The Mathematical Mesh and the New Cryptography

Originally published on Livestream.com on July 28, 2016 at 04:32 AM CDT (56 mins) Phillip Hallam-Baker -- Recent events have reminded us again of the urgent need to make encryption ubiquitous on the Internet. Yet, with the exception of Transport Layer Security, encryption remains the domain of "expert" users. Hope X (2014) was held in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Snowden papers. In the two years since, there have been many important developments in the standards world (in particular, IEEE, IETF, W3C) that are designed to defeat mass surveillance. These efforts include randomized MAC addresses for Wi-Fi, Certificate Transparency, and DNS privacy. This talk will review those efforts and provide a preview of the next generation of cryptographic applications currently being built. The PrismProof email system described at Hope X has become the core of the Mathematical Mesh, an infrastructure that solves the encryption usability problem. Once a device is connected to a user's Mesh profile, all the network application settings (including for OpenPGP, SSH, etc.) are managed automatically from an application controlled by the user. Solving the usability problem and the current move to elliptic curve based cryptography allows Internet security to move beyond the limited cryptographic primitives used in TLS, SSH, and OpenPGP. Public key encryption offers more than just encryption and signatures. Future message encryption schemes will allow end-to-end secure communication within groups of users without the sender having to create decryption material for each intended recipient. Note: The description was truncated due to length limitations. Original event caption: "The Mathematical Mesh and the New Cryptography"