Research AceCrypt's goal is to make cryptography solution to security

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Matt McCann
TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL

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At a small lab in a small, liberal-arts university in a small eastern New Brunswick town, the global future of information defense is being developed.

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Peter Walsh/Telegraph-Journal

Francesco Sica of the Atlantic Centre of Excellence in Cryptographic Research at Mount Allison University.

A brainchild of Francesco Sica and Liam Keliher, the Atlantic Center of Excellence in Cryptographic Research, or AceCrypt, is a lab inside the mathematics and computer science department of Mount Allison University, with the goal of promoting knowledge and research in digital security issues.

"Any time anybody wants to talk securely with anyone else, cryptography is going to be the default solution for doing that," Sica said, talking from 15th annual International Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography, hosted by Mount Allison. "Any time you want to do banking, any time you want to use your credit card, any time you want to secure access to a building. If you want to communicate securely, if you want to be able to verify your identity, to authenticate yourself to someone else, cryptography is the solution to doing any of that."

For example, some credit cards now have imbedded chips in them, which is basically a microprocessor that can form security tasks like authentication.

So are the radio frequency identification tags, like the cards that can be waved to pay quickly at gas pumps.

"These are the types of problems that are specific to industry right now," said Phil Eisen, a cryptographer with Ottawa-based Cloakware Corp. "You want to make sure that the payment gets processed properly, that you're not stealing someone else's identity, and that it gets associated with the right credit card. So, how do we do all these things more cheaply, with processors that are getting ever smaller, and with lower power consumption?"

Though the conference, as with the AceCrypt lab, is a forum for the presentation of original research work on security and implementation of ciphering techniques, the advances being discussed now will eventually find their way into practical applications for industry.

"Eventually this will make way into standards," Sica said. "In about 10 years, you'll see these new techniques surfacing in everyday life, even if it's in hidden ways."

As more and more applications come out, and people want to do more and more things while still protecting their privacy and guaranteeing their identity, cryptography becomes an ever growing field.

"It's as close to a necessity as you're going to get in this world," Eisen said. "People want to maintain their privacy, they don't want to have their identity stolen. You hear about this more and more every day, the way in which these things are being exploited. If you want to be online in this world, then it's become a necessity."

Eisen estimates that a large company like a commercial bank will spend millions of dollars per year protecting their information, and their customer's information.

"It's not cheap, but the cost of not doing it is even higher," Eisen said.

But French cryptographer Jacques Patarin said absolute security is impossible.

"What we're looking for is not 100 per cent security," he said. "We're looking for security that most of the people need most of the time."

A smart card like the RFID tag or the Visa chip costs about one dollar to build, and will avoid most attacks. In the end though, Patarin said people need to realize that they need to be more careful with their data.