Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

As cloud computing and mobile computing continue to become more widely adopted, there is an ever increasing demand for efficient transmission and storage of data. Compression is widely used in Internet-based information systems to satisfy these demands. At the same time, as our daily lives become ever more reliant upon this digital infrastructure, protecting the security and privacy of data becomes a pervasive necessity. Even if a system is built from secure cryptographic algorithms, system-level security is compromised if compression is used with encryption. The recent CRIME and BREACH attacks demonstrate that conventional combinations of compression and encryption are susceptible to ""compression side-channel"" attacks. The only effective remedy is to disable compression for SSL/TLS and HTTPS, which almost 90% of web sites have done. There is also growing momentum to use encryption for almost all Internet connections. The combination of these forces extracts an opportunity cost in transmission time and bandwidth consumption. This research will create a new paradigm of mechanisms for securely combining compression and encryption/authentication that will minimize compression side-channel leakage and be optimized for efficient implementation in hardware. The research will have three thrusts: new algorithms that integrate compression and encryption; optimized hardware implementations; and tools for design, optimization, and analysis. The research results will benefit Canadians from consumers using mobile phones for financial transaction to companies using cloud-computing networks for massive databases. According to a recent study by Information and Communications Technology Council, Canada's cloud computing industry lags behind other parts of the Canadian digital economy. Security concerns are the number one impediment to further adoption of cloud computing by Canadian corporations. Increasing the security and efficiency of mobile and cloud computing will accelerate growth and help raise Canada's standing in cloud computing to match its leadership in other areas of the digital economy.