Saturday 11 February 2005

13:30 16:55

Alberto Pace

CERN

Computer Security 1:  Introduction to cryptography

Overview

The series of lectures addresses the fundamental principles of Cryptography and Public Key Infrastructure and its alternative Kerberos, which from the basis of modern security mechanisms for confidentially, data protection and integrity, authentication of people and systems, The   lectures will present asymmetric encryption, and  will describe its various fields of application. It will then discuss the need for an infrastructure to distribute keys, and the possible architectural models to construct such infrastructure. It will describe compare contract the PKI solution and compare and contrast it to the Kerberos approach.

Outline

An Introduction to Cryptography

Computer security relies on a number of complementary technologies.  Cryptography is one of them. Unlike what is sometimes believed, cryptography's role is not only to ensure the confidentiality of exchanges. It also serves to protect the integrity of transmitted information, and more importantly in Grid environments to authenticate individuals and systems. The lecture describes the fundamentals of asymmetric encryption, and explain how it is implemented in the real world.

An Introduction to PKI

Cryptography is not sufficient to ensure that secret information is safely shared. In particular, distributing cryptographic keys requires an infrastructure of logically connected systems. This is called Pubic Key Infrastructure and is the subject of this lecture.

An Introduction to Kerberos

Kerberos is an alternative to PKI fro authentication. This third lecture explains the respective positioning and the differences. It also explains how the two technologies can be integrated. This is illustrated by practical examples drawn from web and mail services.