Illegitimi non carborundum
Speaker: Ronald Rivest , CSAIL, MIT
Date: May 4 2012
Time: 10:30AM to 12:00PM
Location: 32-G449 Patil/Kiva
Host: Shafi Goldwasser, CSAIL, MIT
Contact: Be Blackburn, 3-6098, imbe@mit.edu
Motivated by the increasing sophistication of recent Advanced
Persistent Threats (APTs), we introduce the game of ``stealthy
takeovers'' (aka ``FlipIt''). FlipIt is a two-player game (between an
attacker and a defender) where either player can move at any given
time, but cannot determine the state of the game until he moves
himself. This stealthy game models various security situations in
which a resource can be ``silently corrupted'' by an adversary, but
then ``disinfected'' later by the defender. Interesting features of
this game include:
* Aggressive play by one player can motivate the other player
to drop out (not play at all).
* Optimal play by the defender generally requires tolerance of
some amount of corruption by the adversary.
We analyze several variants of the game, and show applications of
these ideas in modeling various computer security scenarios, including
password reset, cloud audit, and machine patching.
(The work discussed here is joint with Marten van Dijk, Ari Juels, and
Alina Oprea of RSA Labs.)
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