Research at Verisign: Dr. Burt Kaliski, CTO
Speaker: Dr. Burt Kaliski, Versign
Date: Thursday, February 23 2012
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Refreshments: 4:00PM
Location: 32-G882, Hewlett room
Host: Rachel Traughber, CSAIL IAP
Contact: Rachel Traughber, 617-324-8360, rptraughber@csail.mit.edu
Verisign is one of the Internet’s original “cloud service providers.” Launched out of RSA Data Security, the company was among the first to offer public-key certificates over the Internet. Today, Verisign’s primary business is the operation of the top-level authoritative registries for the more 110 million domain names including .com, .net, and .gov.
In this session, Dr. Burt Kaliski, Chief Technology Officer of Verisign and an MIT Alumnus, will present an overview of Verisign Labs including: innovation, applied research, and how Verisign engages universities. Dr. Kaliski will discuss two current research projects:
• At Black Hat 2011, Artem Dinaburg introduced a “bit-squatting” attack against DNS where an attacker registers new domain names that differ by one bit from popular ones, in order to collect traffic intended for those names when bit errors occur during communications or storage. Verisign Labs’ analysis, based on actual DNS traffic data, highlights some interesting features both of bit-error rates and of the traffic to popular domain names and their single-bit variants.
• Attacks on certificate authorities are becoming a significant concern. At the same time, DNSSEC has begun to be established as a mechanism for securing information distributed in DNS records. The new DANE protocol being developed in the IETF leverages DNSSEC to enable a domain name owner to inform relying parties which certificates and certificate authorities it trusts. Verisign Labs’ research in this area illustrates effective ways to combine assurance that can be provided by certificate authorities, with the assurance from DNS.
Dr. Kaliski will also share information about Verisign’s recently announced Internet Infrastructure Grant Program where Verisign is seeking proposals for research topics focused on an Internet that is available and secure in all countries, supporting a range of infrastructures, given the reality that people and organizations are relying to a growing extent on mobile devices of all kinds for their connectivity.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Burt Kaliski is the chief technology officer at Verisign, Inc. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s long-term technology vision. Dr. Kaliski is working with other executives to turn the vision into near-term value for the company’s business units and customers.
Prior to joining Verisign in 2011, Dr. Kaliski served as the founding director of the EMC Innovation Network, the global collaboration among EMC’s research and advanced technology groups and its university partners. He joined EMC from RSA Security, where he served as vice president of research and chief scientist.
Dr. Kaliski started his career at the RSA startup that came out of MIT in the 1980s, where as the founding scientist of RSA Laboratories, his contributions included the development of the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS), now widely deployed for internet security.
Dr. Kaliski has held appointments as a guest professor at Wuhan University's College of Computer Science, and as a guest professor and member of the international advisory board of Peking University's School of Software and Microelectronics. He has also taught at Stanford University and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Dr. Kaliski is a trustee emeritus of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and Tau Beta Pi. Dr. Kaliski received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on cryptography.
See other events happening in February 2012
