Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM 

Monday, March 8, 1999 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium 

Susan Landau

ABSTRACT -- Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure, as the Cold War culture of wiretaps and international spying taught us.  Yet many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become ever more reliant on telephones and computer networks.  The security of these transactions has become a source of wide public concern and debate, and the US government has proposed various schemes to prevent the proliferation of unbreakable cryptography (and thus perfectly concealable communications).

What would be the cost to society if criminals concealed their communications using codes the government cannot decipher?  How will U.S. economic competitiveness be affected by export controls on cryptographic systems?  How important is protecting society from abuses by criminals and terrorists versus protecting personal privacy from all threats -- including potential eavesdropping by the government?

In this talk we consider the dual-edged sword cryptography presents to both law enforcement and national security, and we put the current policy on cryptography in the context of decisions over the last twenty years. 

SPEAKER: Susan Landau is Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.  Before joining Sun, she was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, and MSRI.  She and Whitfield Diffie have written ``Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption.''  Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy.''  Landau has done extensive work in symbolic computation and algebraic algorithms.  She is currently a Distinguished Lecturer for Sigma Xi, and an Associate Editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, as well as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Association for Women in Mathemtics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Landau received her PhD from MIT, her MS from Cornell, and her BA from Princeton.