Professor Leo Reyzin awarded a $500k grant by NSF
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $500K to fund Professor Reyzin’s research efforts. The three-year project, titled “Noisy Secrets as Alternatives to Passwords and PKI,” will explore innovative approaches to authentication.
Current approaches, which rely on passwords or trusted authorities, suffer from significant vulnerabilities. This project will investigate using other sources of information that communicating parties share. Many natural sources of such information (such as visual passwords or physical tokens) are noisy, and don’t give the same result each time they are accessed. The funded research will study how this noise can be overcome to give reliable authentication.