Guarding The Mails: Cryptography at the assistance of the Secret Service of the Post Office Department

One of the important and most visible applications of modern information security is mail. The talk covers the history and development of ideas in using modern information security to payments in mailing and similar applications (e.g. sin taxes).

We shall explore system approach whereby protection of financial assets can be approached from several levels, namely system level, device level and message level. We shall define alternative architectures (non-cryptographic and cryptographic, both symmetric and public key based) and criteria for security comparison.  This naturally leads to some of the most  challenging and original parts of the system that require new tools to achieve message level security. We will demonstrate        that Elliptic Curve based Digital Signature, and its specialized custom tailored version Elliptic Curve Pintsov-Vanstone Signature (ECPVS) delivers the overall best trade-offs between conflicting application requirements. We will show how ECPVS can be used as an effective countermeasure against duplication, by far the most technically challenging of message-level attacks.

We will briefly examine needs for securing computer communications in postal domain and suggest applications for specialized ECC-based certification authority. Finally we shall have a brief overview of other than mail applications where ECPVS proven to be beneficial.

For the most part the talk is intended to be accessible to the general audience and covers basis principles and ideas rather than detailed technical descriptions.