CS&E Profile: Yongdae Kim

Group Security, and network security.

Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Southern California (USC).

B.S.& M.S., 1991 & 1993 in Mathematics at Yonsei University.

About

Associate Professor Kim specializes in group and network security. He has authored or co-authored more than 35 publications, including various journal and conference papers. Kim has developed one software program and was partially involved with development of large scale distributed system, called Secure Spread. He has also served on many conference committees.

Research

Group Key Agreement

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area, having received much attention in recent years. Since most group communication takes place over the Internet, security is a major concern. The fundamental security challenge revolves around secure and efficient group key management. Centralized key management methods (key distribution) are appropriate for 2-party (e.g., client-server or peer-to-peer) communication as well as for large multicast groups. However, most collaborative group settings require distributed key management techniques. Therefore, my thesis work focused on secure and efficient distributed group key management techniques. The contribution of my thesis is threefold:

1. development of novel distributed key management techniques,
2. rigorous proof of security for these techniques, and
3. their integration with a reliable group communication system and experimentation to measure the performance of the resulting system.

Other topics

My current interests encompass all security aspects of peer groups. Security problems in peer groups are challenging and interesting due to their distributed and non-hierarchical nature. Each group member has the same rights and no trusted parties are assumed. Every decision and action (ideally) should be decided collaboratively. Examples of peer groups that I am interested in include group communication systems, peer-to-peer systems (such as file sharing and content distribution), MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) and anonymous communication systems. Security issues in such environments can be enumerated as: key management, signature mechanisms, public key infrastructures, admission control protocols, and security policy negotiations. I would like to provide solutions to these issues in conjunction with different communication systems.