Massimiliano Pala

research fellow
computer science, dartmouth college

6211 Sudikoff Lab, Hanover, NH 03755
tel. (603) 369 - 9332|fax. (603) 646 - 1672
pala -at- cs -dot- dartmouth -dot- edu

Current Reseach Projects and Activities

PKI Resources Query Protocol: one of the most strategic problems still open is the PKI data and services availability. We are developing a new protocol (PRQP) that helps users and third parties to locate CAs' provided services.
[ internet draft | paper | paper ]
Trusted Computing Deploying: Trusted Computing is becoming ever more important for applications and operating system. By combining TPM into existing environments it is possible to provide a new source of trust that may be used for secure computing.

Open Research Projects

[ LibPKI ] The LibPKI Project is aimed to provide an easy-to-use PKI library for PKI enabled application development. The library provides the developer with all the needed functionalities to manage certificates, from generation to validation. The LibPKI Project enables developers with the possibility to implement complex cryptographic operations with a few simple function calls by implementing an high-level cryptographic API.
[ OpenCA Labs ] The OpenCA Labs, born from the former OpenCA Project, is an open organization aimed to provide a framework for PKI studying and development of related projects.
[ P.A.O.S. Project ] This project collects and analyses the usage of HTTP servers by the Italian Public Administrations. At the moment the scope of the data collection includes local administrations - municipalities, provinces and regions.

Past Research Projects

Centralised Trust Management: by using a sort of cross-certification, we are currently investigatin how to provide a centralised management of trusted certificates within current applications (e.g. web browsers or MUAs).
[ paper ]
E-Mail Policy Enforcement System: by combining public-key technologies with existing Internet protocols EMPE provides a method to shift the sender authentication information from the SMTP envelope or communication channel to the message body.
[ paper ]
Perfect and Trusted Viewers: a method to define the requirements for the applications that comply with the "What You See Is What You Sign" (WYSIWYS) requirement for electronic document signatures.
[ paper ]
Privacy Preserving OCSP: OCSP requests and responses could be tracked by an adversary to find out activities of a user . We are studying an extension to the OCSP protocol which provide a level of anonymity.