Thursday, 03 July 2008

A project developing security key protocols for encrypted communications has won the 2008 Detica Security Prize for the best security-related thesis in the Computer Science Department of the University of Bristol.

Winner of prize Stephen Williams, the most outstanding student of the year, will be continuing his studies by starting a PhD in Cryptography at Bristol under the supervision of Professor Nigel Smart.

Nick Spenceley, Head of Detica Forensics, said “Each year, the quality of the prize-winning work at Bristol has been extremely high and we are delighted that Detica’s association with the University of Bristol is helping to raise the profile of cryptography amongst students whose skills are in increasing demand by industry and commerce.”

Professor Nigel Smart commented, “We greatly appreciate our link with Detica: it inspires students in their dissertations and enables their efforts to be recognised by a global information intelligence specialist. Stephen’s work was outstanding and I am expect that he will become a leading figure in cryptography in the years to come.”

Stephen Williams’ work investigated security models and proofs for key agreement protocols especially as it related to protocols like TLS (Transport layer Security). He extended recent work of Morrissey, Smart and Warinschi on TLS using Signcryption as the pre-master secret key agreement protocol and extended the model to deal with other forms of key agreement, such as those based on symmetric cryptographic schemes.