Abstract:
Devising effective Content Protection mechanisms and building satisfactory
Digital Rights Management systems have been top priorities for the
Publishing and Entertainment Industries in recent years. Corporate DRM
efforts have so far attempted to address this challenge with systems
characterized by a tight control over the user media platform. This
approach, however, brings about rigid limitations on the user experience
(e.g., restrictions on the creation of back-up copies of purchased
copyrighted content), ultimately resulting in an unhappy customer base.
Research advances over the last few years show that Cryptography holds
promise for the development of flexible tools that could enable fair DRM
solutions. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my investigations
along this direction, and I will then focus on the case of transmission of
live events, where the sensitivity of the content under distribution
decreases with time. For this setting, I will present a scheme in which
unauthorized disclosure of access control credentials can be traced back
to the leaker(s), thus discouraging piracy by the threat of detection.
The proposed solution improves upon the state of the art both in
communication performance and in security guarantees.
Before concluding, I will briefly discuss some of my other cryptographic
research, including an on-going project that was recently funded by DARPA
in the context of the "System F6" initiative.
Bio:
Nelly Fazio earned her M.Sc. ('03) and Ph.D. ('06) in Computer Science
from New York University. During her studies, she also conducted research
at Stanford University, Ecole Normale Superieure (France) and Aarhus
University (Denmark). In 2003, she was awarded the NYU CIMS Sandra
Bleistein prize, for "notable achievement by a woman in Applied
Mathematics or Computer Science." Her Ph.D. thesis was nominated with
honorable mention for the NYU J. Fabri prize, awarded yearly for the "most
outstanding dissertation in Computer Science."
Dr. Fazio's research interests are in cryptography and information
security, with a focus on digital content protection. Since July 2006, she
is part of the Content Protection group at IBM Almaden Research Center,
where she has been conducting research on advanced cryptographic key
management, tracing technologies, and authenticated communications in
dynamic federated environments. Currently, she is a visiting research
scientist in the Security group at IBM T.J. Watson Research center,
working on security issues of decentralized enironments such as sensor
networks.