Identity and Access Management without Breaching the Privacy in Distributed Systems

Abstract:

With the growth of cyber-physical systems, identity and access management is an essential, first line, security feature in communication systems. Acquiring user information to provide this feature might severely breach the user-privacy. In this talk, we discuss privacy-aware information-theoretic protocols for the main blocks of an identity and access management system; i.e., private user authentication, private access control, and private hypothesis testing.
1) For the private authentication problem, we consider a setup consisting of a certificate authority, some verifiers, many legitimate users (provers), and an arbitrary number of attackers. Each legitimate user wants to be authenticated (using his personal key) by the verifier(s), while simultaneously staying completely anonymous (even to the verifier). On the other hand, an attacker must fail to be authenticated. Introducing an interactive information-theoretic framework for the problem, we propose achievable schemes for the finite size and asymptotic regimes and show their optimality in some cases.
2) In attribute-based access control, users with certain verified attributes will gain access to some particular data. We investigate the fundamental limits of the problem of distributed attribute-based private access control (DAPAC) with multiple authorities, where each authority will learn and verify only one of the attributes.
3) We study the problem of distributed binary hypothesis testing in the Gray-Wyner network with side information, where an observer has access to a discrete memoryless and stationary source and describes its observation to two detectors via one common and two private channels. Each detector also has access to its own discrete memoryless and stationary source. The goal is to perform two distinct binary hypothesis testing on the joint distribution of observations at detectors. Additionally, the observer aims to keep a correlated latent source private against the detectors. An achievable inner bound is derived for the general case.

Bio:

Mahtab Mirmohseni is an associate professor at Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif university of Technology. She joined Sharif in Spring 2014 as an assistant professor. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. Mahtab received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, IRAN in the field of Communication Systems in 2005, 2007 and 2012, respectively. She was the recipient of the Award of the national festival of the Women and Science (Maryam Mirzakhani Award), 2019. Her current research interests include different aspects of information theory, mostly focusing on secure and private communication and molecular communication.