You want to send a PDF to your colleague, but the information is sensitive. You password-protect the document (encryption) and store it on your flash drive. To read the PDF, you share that password with your colleague, who uses it to gain access to the file (decryption). The goal is to ensure that someone who does not know the password cannot decrypt the PDF.

“This is harder than it seems,” says Israeli-born computer scientist and electrical engineer Dan Boneh, who works at Stanford University.

On June 20, Boneh received the 2014 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences for technical contributions that have made cryptography easier to use, including developing algorithms that have helped establish the field of pairings-based cryptography. The award, which was presented at a San Francisco banquet, came with a $175,000 prize from the Infosys Foundation.

“Boneh has produced new directions and given the field a fresh start,” says ACM President Alexander L. Wolf.

One approach that shows how Boneh’s pairings can be applied is called identity-based encryption. Encrypting a document involves software that uses one key to encode text and a second key to ensure that only the designated recipient can decode it. Identity-based encryption simplifies the creation of coding keys by treating the recipient’s email address as a coding key. Anyone can use the software to encode a document and send it to that email address knowing that only the recipient, in possession of the decoding key, can decrypt the document.

Read the Full Article: Source – Algemeiner
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/06/29/israeli-computer-expert-works-to-simplify-cyber-security/#

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