The Mellon Foundation recently awarded Dartmouth's Public Key Infrastructure team a $1.5 million grant to for research that looks to revolutionize Internet security at academic institutions across the country.
Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, refers to a digital technology that utilizes an infrastructure of private and public keys to encrypt and decrypt information in order to send it securely over the Internet.
The purpose of the Mellon grant and the goal of the PKI team at Dartmouth will be to create and deploy such an infrastructure on a large scale to be used across America.
"Within a year we should have some good prototypes running. And within two years we hope to have it in place and being used across academia," Sean Smith, a professor of computer science and a pioneer in PKI research, said.
"You could argue that PKI is the next 'big thing,'" said Smith, who is the principal investigator of the team that received the grant.
"From the dawn of time to the age of disco, there was only one kind of cryptography. You and I needed to know the same secret. Now, we have developed technologies that will allow the secrets to be different," he said.
The PKI program at Dartmouth began in the summer of 2000.
"Internet II, an organization that sponsors security research, was looking to stimulate interest in PKI and we won their grant," Smith said.
The team began by testing small scale PKI projects.
"Then we learned why PKI hadn't succeeded before," Smith continued. "You can't just sit and think of an idea. You need a critical mass. That's what led us to talk to the Mellon Foundation, which was interested in improving the academic process through technology."
The Mellon Foundation chose Dartmouth after an application process in which Dartmouth applied for the grant in competition with other organizations also developing PKI.
The college's PKI team itself is composed of a number of researchers and administrators.
In addition to Smith, members include Director of Computing Larry Levine, Associate Director of Computing Technologies Robert Brentrup, Institute for Security Technology research assistant Edward Feustel, sociology Professor Denise Anthony and computer sciences Chair David Nicol.
The work that the college's PKI team is doing has implications for the future of the Internet that will affect not only Dartmouth, but the entire world.
"The grant is about increasing the level of security possible on the Internet," Levine said, adding that there are currently a number of ways to make a network secure, none of which are satisfactory.
"They do not look to authentication. They do not look to authorization. PKI is a generic name for a set of security services that solve these problems," Levine said.
One implication of PKI at Dartmouth would be that BlitzMail users would be able to verify with absolute certainty the identities of the senders and receivers of all Blitz messages.
According to Feustel, the grant will help to enhance Dartmouth's reputation as a center for Internet technology research.
"We think that this can really do Dartmouth's Internet reputation a good deal," he said.
Members of the college's team are optimistic for the future of public key technology.
