Aurora University to offer new online computer science degree - Chicago Tribune
Aurora University will offer a new, online computer science degree program.The program, which will award students a bachelor of science degree, is designed to help adult students prepare for careers in technology, university officials said in a statement. The university is accepting applications for the program, which will begin Aug. 29.
Aurora University has offered an in-person computer science program for three years. In that program, all graduates have found work in their field within six months of graduation, according to the university.
"We are excited to offer our adult degree completion program in computer science online," Donna Gardner Liljegren, dean of online enrollment and continuing education for the university's online program, said in a statement. "Students enrolling in this program can expect to develop skills as high-level problem-solvers and programmers — skills that are in demand in the digital age. Our fully online bachelor of science program is competitively priced and designed to prepare students for a range of industry roles."
More information about the online degree program is available at online.aurora.edu
How To Stay Anonymous Online? Researchers At MIT's Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Are ... - University Herald
Anonymity networks offer individuals living under restraining regimes protection from surveillance of their internet use. But citing the recently divulged vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks - Tor - has urged computer scientists to bring forth more secure anonymity schemes.An all-new anonymity scheme that offers strong security guarantees, but utilizes bandwidth more efficiently as compared to its predecessors is in the works.
Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in collaboration with the the école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will present the new scheme during the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in this month.
During experiments, the researchers' system required only one-tenth as much time as current systems to transfer a large file between anonymous users, according to a post on MIT official website.
Albert Kwon, the first author on the new paper and a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science said as the basic use case, the team thought of doing anonymous file-sharing where both, the receiving and the sending ends didn't each other.
This was done keeping in mind that honeypotting and other similar things - in which spies offer services via an anonymity network in a bid to entice its users - are real challenges. "But we also studied applications in microblogging," Kwon said - something like Twitter where a user can opt to anonymously broadcast his/her message to everyone.
The system designed by Kwon in collaboration with his coauthors - Bryan Ford SM '02 PhD '08, an associate professor of computer and communication sciences at the école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, David Lazar, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and his adviser Srini Devadas - makes use of an array of existing cryptographic techniques, but combines them in a peculiar manner.
The internet, for a lot of people can seem like a frightening and intimidating place and all they seek is help feeling safer on the internet, especially while performing an array of tasks such as making an online purchase, Anonhq reported.
Shell game
A series of servers known as a 'mixnet,' is the core f the system. Just before passing a received message on to the next server, each server rearranges the order in which it receives messages - for instance - messages from Tom, Bob and Rob reach the first server in the order A, B, C, that server would then forward them to the second server in a completely different order, something like C, B, A. The second server would do the same before sending them to the third and so on.
Even if an attacker somehow manages to track the messages' point of origin, he/she will not be able to decipher which was which by the time they moved out of the last server. The new system is called 'Riffle' citing this reshuffling of the messages.
Public proof
In a bid to curb messages tampering, Riffle makes use of a technique dubbed a verifiable shuffle.
Thanks to the onion encryption, the messages forwarded by each server does not resemble the ones it receives, it has peeled off a layer of encryption. However, the encryption can be done in a way that allows the server to generate mathematical evidence that the messages it sends are indeed credible manipulations of the ones it receives.
In order to verify the proof, it has to be checked against copies of messages received by the server. Basically, with Riffle, users send their primary messages to all the servers in the mixnet at the same time. Servers then independently check for manipulation.
As long as one server in the mixnet continues to be uncompromised by an attacker, Riffle is cryptographically secure.
How to stay anonymous online | MIT News - The MIT Tech
Anonymity networks protect people living under repressive regimes from surveillance of their Internet use. But the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks — Tor — has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes.At the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will present a new anonymity scheme that provides strong security guarantees but uses bandwidth much more efficiently than its predecessors. In experiments, the researchers’ system required only one-tenth as much time as similarly secure experimental systems to transfer a large file between anonymous users.
“The initial use case that we thought of was to do anonymous file-sharing, where the receiving end and sending end don’t know each other,” says Albert Kwon, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. “The reason is that things like honeypotting” — in which spies offer services through an anonymity network in order to entrap its users — “are a real issue. But we also studied applications in microblogging, something like Twitter, where you want to anonymously broadcast your messages to everyone.”
The system devised by Kwon and his coauthors — his advisor, Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; David Lazar, also a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; and Bryan Ford SM ’02 PhD ’08, an associate professor of computer and communication sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne — employs several existing cryptographic techniques but combines them in a novel manner.
Shell game
The heart of the system is a series of servers called a mixnet. Each server permutes the order in which it receives messages before passing them on to the next. If, for instance, messages from senders Alice, Bob, and Carol reach the first server in the order A, B, C, that server would send them to the second server in a different order — say, C, B, A. The second server would permute them before sending them to the third, and so on.
An adversary that had tracked the messages’ points of origin would have no idea which was which by the time they exited the last server. It’s this reshuffling of the messages that gives the new system its name: Riffle.
Like many anonymity systems, Riffle also uses a technique known as onion encryption; “Tor,” for instance, is an acronym for “the onion router.” With onion encryption, the sending computer wraps each message in several layers of encryption, using a public-key encryption system like those that safeguard most financial transactions online. Each server in the mixnet removes only one layer of encryption, so that only the last server knows a message’s ultimate destination.
A mixnet with onion encryption is effective against a passive adversary, which can only observe network traffic. But it’s vulnerable to active adversaries, which can infiltrate servers with their own code. This is not improbable in anonymity networks, where frequently the servers are simply volunteers’ Internet-connected computers, loaded with special software.
If, for instance, an adversary that has commandeered a mixnet router wants to determine the destination of a particular message, it could simply replace all the other messages it receives with its own, bound for a single destination. Then it would passively track the one message that doesn’t follow its own prespecified route.
Public proof
To thwart message tampering, Riffle uses a technique called a verifiable shuffle. Because of the onion encryption, the messages that each server forwards look nothing like the ones it receives; it has peeled off a layer of encryption. But the encryption can be done in such a way that the server can generate a mathematical proof that the messages it sends are valid manipulations of the ones it receives.
Verifying the proof does require checking it against copies of the messages the server received. So with Riffle, users send their initial messages to not just the first server in the mixnet but all of them, simultaneously. Servers can then independently check for tampering.
Generating and checking proofs is a computationally intensive process, however, which would significantly slow down the network if it had to be repeated with every message. So Riffle uses yet another technique called authentication encryption, which can verify the authenticity of an encrypted message.
Authentication encryption is much more efficient to execute than the verifiable shuffle, but it requires the sender and the receiver to share a private cryptographic key. So Riffle uses the verifiable shuffle only to establish secure connections that let each user and each mixnet server agree upon a key. Then it uses authentication encryption for the remainder of the communication session.
As long as one server in the mixnet remains uncompromised by an adversary, Riffle is cryptographically secure.
“The idea of mixnets has been around for a long time, but unfortunately it’s always relied on public-key cryptography and on public-key techniques, and that’s been expensive,” says Jonathan Katz, director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “One of the contributions of this paper is that they showed how to use more efficient symmetric-key techniques to accomplish the same thing. They do one expensive shuffle using known protocols, but then they bootstrap off of that to enable many subsequent shufflings.”
“When you use standard encryption on the Internet, you use an expensive public-key crypto system to encrypt a short key, and then you use symmetric-key techniques to encrypt your longer message,” Katz adds. “But it’s novel in the context of these mixnets. They’ve been around for 20, 25 years, and nobody has had this insight until now. In the standard context of encryption, you have the honest sender and the honest receiver, and they’re defending against an external malicious attacker. Here, you need stronger properties. The issue is that the server that’s doing the shuffling might themselves be malicious. So you need a way to ensure that even a malicious server can’t shuffle incorrectly.”
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