CYBER SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY
Benjamin W. Fuller
Benjamin Fuller
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cyber Systems and Technology Group
244 Wood Street
Lexington, MA 02420-9108
voice: 781-981-4438
email: bfuller@ll.mit.edu
Prior to joining MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2007, Mr. Benjamin Fuller worked at IBM and the National Security Agency. His research focuses on cryptography and practical solutions to secure communication. In particular, Mr. Fuller developed efficient group key distribution techniques for tactical networks. This research spanned research, implementation, and testing in real networks. This research produced several publications including, “ASE: Authenticated Statement Exchange”, which won best paper at IEEE Network Computing and Applications in 2010. The follow-on architecture, Lincoln Open Cryptographic Key Management Architecture, was a 2012 R&D 100 Award winner.
Mr. Fuller is pursuing his Ph.D. at Boston University under the direction of Professor Leonid Reyzin. Mr. Fuller’s research focuses on cryptography with imperfect and noisy randomness. This research follows two threads. What can be achieved cryptographically when only imperfect randomness is available? Imperfect randomness arises in two distinct situations: 1) compensating for the bias of hardware random number generators 2) overcoming partial adversary knowledge of secret state. Mr. Fuller’s master’s thesis, “Computational Entropy and Information Leakage,” focused on this problem. This research measures cryptographic resistance to numerous side-channels attacks published in recent years. Follow on research considers public-key encryption when no randomness is available at encryption time and messages are the only source of randomness.
The second thread is cryptography with only noisy secrets. Noisy secrets arise in two important applications: biometrics and physically uncloneable functions. In both of these applications, noisy readings are made from a physical phenomenon that changes over time. These applications present a promising alternative to passwords. Mr. Fuller’s current research at Lincoln Laboratory focuses on providing secure key derivation from noisy distributions.
Mr. Fuller earned a B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006 and a M.A. in computer science from Boston University in 2010.
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