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Research
My general interests are in cryptography, computer & network
security, and theoretical computer science. The focus of my
research is on proving the
security of computer systems and protocols. The central questions
in this research are:
- What should it mean for a
computer system to be secure? In order to prove the security of
a system or protocol we must first establish formal definitions of
security.
- What can we prove about the
security of current systems and protocols? Given a formal
security goal, it is sometimes possible to prove that existing
protocols satisfy this definition or show that they do not.
- How can we construct efficient
systems with provable security properties? If we cannot prove
the security of an existing protocol or system, a natural alternative
is to construct a system so that the proof of security is
tractable.
The main application areas to which my research applies these questions
are privacy and anonymity and
peer-to-peer systems. I
have had the privilege of working on these subjects with many bright students.
Papers
Journals
Eugene Y. Vasserman and Nicholas Hopper. "Vampire attacks: Draining
life from wireless ad-hoc networks," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, to appear.
Eric Chan-Tin, Victor Heorhiadi, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "The Frog-Boiling Attack: Limitations of
Secure Network Coordinate Systems." ACM Transactions on Information and
Systems Security (TISSEC), 14(3):1-28, November 2011.
Peng Wang, James Tyra, Eric Chan-Tin, Tyson Malchow, Denis Foo Kune,
Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Attacking the kad network - real world
evaluation and high fidelity simulation using DVN" Security and Communication Networks, to
appear.
Nicholas Hopper, Eugene Y. Vasserman, and Eric Chan-Tin. "How much anonymity does network latency
leak?" ACM Transactions on
Information and System Security (TISSEC), 13(2):1-28, February
2010. (© 2010
ACM)
Nicholas Hopper, Luis von Ahn, and John Langford. "Provably Secure Steganography," IEEE Transactions on Computers
58(5): 662-676, May 2009. (©2009
IEEE)
Eugene Y. Vasserman, Nicholas Hopper, and James Tyra. "SilentKnock:
practical, provably undetectable authentication." International Journal of Information
Security 8(2): 121-135, April 2009.
Jung Hee Cheon, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim and Ivan Osipkov. "Provably Secure Timed-Release Public
Key Encryption." ACM
Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) 11(2):1-44,
March 2008. (© 2008 ACM)
Peer-reviewed Conference/Workshops
Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Huy
Tran, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim. "On the Mixing Time of Directed
Social Graphs and Security Implications," at ASIACCS 2012.
Eric Chan-Tin and Nicholas Hopper. "KoNKS: Konsensus-style Network Koordinate System," at ASIACCS 2012.
Zi Lin, Denis Foo Kune and Nicholas Hopper. "Efficient Private Proximity
Testing with GSM Location Sketches," at Financial Crypto 2012.
Rob Jansen and Nicholas Hopper. "Shadow: Running Tor in a Box for
Accurate and Efficient Experimentation," at NDSS 2012. Also available as UMN
Tech Report 11-020.
Denis Foo Kune, John Koelndorfer, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae
Kim. "Location leaks over the GSM air interface," at NDSS 2012.
Peter Lofgren and Nicholas Hopper. "FAUST:
Efficient, TTP-Free Abuse Prevention by Anonymous Whitelisting," at WPES 2011.
Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Keep your
friends close: Incorporating Trust into social network-based Sybil
defenses," at INFOCOM 2011.
Peter Lofgren and Nicholas Hopper. "BNymble
(A short paper): More
anonymous blacklisting at almost no cost," at Financial Crypto 2011.
Eric Chan-Tin and Nicholas Hopper. "Accurate
and Provably Secure
Latency Estimation with Treeple," at NDSS
2011.
Max Schuchard, Eugene Vasserman, Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Denis Foo Kune,
Nicholas Hopper,
and Yongdae Kim. "Losing
Control of the Internet: Using the Data Plane to Attack the Control
Plane," at NDSS 2011.
Rob Jansen, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Recruiting New Tor Relays with BRAIDS," at CCS 2010.
Zi Lin and Nicholas Hopper. "Jack: Scalable
Accumulator-Based Nymble System," at WPES 2010.
Max Schuchard, Alexander W. Dean, Victor Heorhiadi, Nicholas
Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Balancing the
Shadows," at WPES 2010.
Jon McLachlan, Andrew Tran, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Scalable
onion routing with Torsk," at
CCS 2009.
Eugene Vasserman, Rob Jansen, James Tyra, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae
Kim. "Membership-concealing overlay networks,"
at CCS 2009.
Jon McLachlan and Nicholas Hopper. "On the
risks of serving whenever
you
surf: Vulnerabilities in Tor's blocking resistance design," at WPES 2009.
Andrew Tran, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim. "Hashing it out in
public: Common failure modes of DHT-based anonymity schemes," at WPES 2009.
Eric Chan-Tin, Daniel Feldman, Yongdae Kim and Nicholas Hopper. "The
Frogboiling attack: limitations of anomaly detection for secure network
coordinates," at SecureComm 2009.
Hun-Jeong
Kang, Eric Chan-Tin, Yongdae Kim and Nicholas Hopper. "Why
Kad Lookup
Fails," at P2P09.
B. Kang et al. "Towards Complete Node Enumeration in a
Peer-to-Peer Botnet," at ASIACCS
2009.
P. Wang, J. Tyra, E. Chan-Tin, T. Malchow, D. Foo Kune, N.
Hopper and Y. Kim. "Attacking
the Kad Network,"
at SecureComm
2008.
Erik Shimshock, Matthew Staats, and Nicholas Hopper. "Breaking and Provably Fixing Minx,"
at PET 2008.
Jon McLachlan and Nicholas
Hopper. "Don't Clog the Queue:
Circuit
Clogging and Mitigation in P2P anonymity schemes," at Financial Crypto
2008.
Nicholas Hopper, Eugene Y. Vasserman, and Eric Chan-Tin. "How much
anonymity does network latency leak?" at CCS 2007.
Eugene Vasserman, Nicholas Hopper, John Laxson, and James
Tyra.
"SilentKnock: Practical and Provably
Undetectable Authentication." at ESORICS
2007.
Ivan Osipkov, Eugene Vasserman, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim.
"Combatting
Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems." at ICDCS 2007.
Nicholas Hopper, David Molnar, and David Wagner. "From
Weak to
Strong Watermarking." at 4th
Theoretical Cryptography Conference: TCC 2007.
(Full version)
Nicholas Hopper and Eugene Vasserman. "On the
effectiveness of k-anonymity
against traffic
analysis and surveillance," at Privacy
in the Electronic Society: WPES 2006.
Luis von Ahn, Andrew Bortz, Nicholas Hopper, and Kevin
O'Neill. "Selectively Traceable Anonymity,"
at Privacy Enhancing Technologies:
PET 2006.
Ivan Osipkov, Peng Wang, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim.
"Robust Accounting in
Decentralized P2P Storage Systems," at ICDCS 2006.
Jung Hee Cheon, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim and Ivan Osipkov.
"Authenticated Key-Insulated
Public Key Encryption and Timed-Release Cryptography," at Financial Crypto 2006.
Nicholas Hopper. "On
Steganographic Chosen Covertext Security," at ICALP 2005.
Luis von Ahn, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford. "Covert
Two-Party Computation," at STOC 2005.
Luis von Ahn and Nicholas J. Hopper. "
Public-Key Steganography," at Eurocrypt
2004.
Luis von Ahn, Andrew Bortz, and Nicholas J. Hopper. "k-Anonymous Message
Transmission," at CCS 2003.
Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John
Langford. "
CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems for Security," at Eurocrypt 2003.
Nicholas J. Hopper, John Langford, and Luis Von Ahn. "
Provably Secure Steganography," at Crypto 2002.
Nicholas J. Hopper and Manuel Blum. "
Secure Human Identification Protocols," at Asiacrypt 2001.
Nicholas J. Hopper, Sanjit A. Seshia, and Jeanette M. Wing,
"Combining Theory Generation and Model Checking for Security Protocol
Analysis," at Formal Methods in
Computer
Security, July 2000. Also available as CMU Technical Report
CMU-CS-00-107, January 2000.
Nicholas Freitag McPhee and Nicholas J. Hopper. " Analysis of
Genetic Diversity through Population History," in GECCO99:
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference,
July 1999.
Nicholas Freitag McPhee and Nicholas J. Hopper. "
AppGP: An
alternative structural representation for GP," in Proceedings of
the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, June 1999.
Nicholas Freitag McPhee, Nicholas J. Hopper, and Mitchell
L. Reierson. " Impact
of types on essentially typeless problems in GP," in Genetic
Programming 1998: Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference,
July
1998.
Peer-Reviewed Conference Posters and Abstracts
Max Schuchard, Chris Thompson, Nicholas Hopper and Yongdae Kim. "Taking Routers off their Meds: Why Assumptions of Router Stability are Dangerous," in NDSS'12 Chair's Invited Session.
Rob Jansen, Paul Syverson, and Nicholas Hopper. "Throttling Tor
Bandwidth Parasites," in NDSS'12
Chair's Invited Session. Full version available as UMN Tech
Report 11-019.
Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim. "Designs to Account for Trust in Social
Network-based Sybil Defenses," in CCS'10/Posters.
Eric Chan-Tin and Nicholas Hopper. "Secure
Latency Estimation with Treeple," in CCS'10/Posters.
Max Schuchard, Abdelaziz Mohaisen, Denis Foo Kune, Nicholas Hopper,
Yongdae Kim, and Eugene Vasserman. "Losing
Control of the Internet: Using the Data Plane to Attack the Control
Plane," in CCS'10/Posters.
In submission
Please send e-mail if you are
interested in any of the following:
Eugene Y. Vasserman, Victor Heorhiadi, Yongdae Kim, and Nicholas
Hopper. "Censorship resistant overlay publishing", 2011. UMN Tech Report 11-027.
Max Schuchard, Chris Thompson, Yongdae Kim and Nicholas
Hopper. "Taking Routers Off Their Meds: Unstable Routers and the Buggy BGP Implementations that Cause Them," 2011.
Other
Peng Wang, Ivan Osipkov, Nicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim.
"Myrmic: Provably secure and efficient DHT routing," DTC
Technical Report, 2006.
Nicholas J. Hopper. "Toward
a Theory of Steganography," CMU Ph.D. Thesis, 2004.
Nicholas J. Hopper and Manuel Blum, "A Secure Human-Computer
Authentication Scheme", CMU Technical Report
CMU-CS-00-139, May 2000.
Teaching
At Minnesota:
Spring 2012 - CSci 4011: Inherent Limitations of Computer Programs.
Fall 2011 - CSci
5271: Overview of Computer Science.
Spring 2011 - CSci
1001: Overview of Computer Science.
Fall 2010 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer Security.
Fall 2010 - CSci
8980: Advanced Cryptography Seminar.
Spring 2010 - CSci
5403: Complexity Theory.
Fall 2009 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer Security.
Spring 2009 - CSci
4011: Inherent Limitations of Computer Programs.
Fall 2008 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer Security.
Spring 2008 - CSci
5403: Complexity Theory.
Fall 2007 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer Security.
Spring 2007 - CSci
4011: Formal Languages and Automata Theory.
Fall 2006 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer Security.
Spring 2006 -
CSci 4011: Formal Languages and Automata Theory.
Fall 2005 - CSci
5271: Introduction to Computer
Security.
Spring 2005 - CSci
8980: Advanced Cryptography.
At CMU:
Spring 2003 -
15-859I
Theoretical Aspects of Cryptography
Fall 2001 -
15-827 Security
and Cryptography
Fall 2000 -
15-451 Algorithms
Etc.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
