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Home > Our Work > MITRE Research Program > Best Paper Awards > | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Best Paper Awards - 2002 The Best Paper Awards Committee has chosen two papers dealing with aspects of cryptographic security as the winners of the Best Paper Award for calendar year 2002. Gerald Gilbert and Michael Hamrick both of the Center for Command, Control and Communication, received the award for their paper "Secrecy, Computational Loads and Rates in Practical Quantum Cryptography," published in the journal Algorithmica, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 314–339. Joshua D. Guttman and F. Javier Thayer of the Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems were honored for "Authentication Tests and the Structure of Bundles," published in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 283, pp. 333–380. "I'm very pleased with this year's selections," says Senior Vice President for Information and Technology Dave Lehman, who chairs the Best Paper Awards Committee. "The two papers are exceptional examples of high-quality technical work. Even more important, they have had an impact both on those actually implementing real systems and on the research community." Quantum cryptography relies on random streams of photons to transmit encryption keys, offering the possibility of unconditionally secure key exchange. To realize this goal, systems must make use of practical physical devices, and measure and adjust parameters to both meet the provable security conditions and maximize the rate of key generation. In their paper, Gerald Gilbert, who initiated and directs MITRE's Quantum Information Science Group, and Michael Hamrick analyze realistic implementations of quantum key exchange against the most realistic family of attacks and compute the optimal throughput rates attainable with these physical implementations. As Gilbert points out, "Quantum information science, including quantum cryptography and quantum computing, is one of the most active and exciting areas of scientific research today. We are especially pleased to have written a paper that makes a new contribution in the midst of all this activity. While our work makes full use of the techniques of fundamental theoretical physics and pure mathematics, our approach concentrates as well on emphasizing real-world constraints. According to Professor Michele Mosca, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation (Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo, and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics), this paper is "the first of its kind, and sets the standard for future work in this important area of practical quantum cryptography.' " Guttman's and Thayer's paper extends the impact of the work for which they and Jonathan Herzog won the Best Paper Award in 1999, both in terms of understanding individual cryptographic protocols and in terms of underlying techniques. Guttman explains, "In the 1999 paper, we introduced the strand space framework and a particular method for proving security properties. The 2002 paper introduces a new 'authentication test' method for proving protocols correct. These tests also form the basis of the protocol design method. Several other groups have adopted our method now because it is really much easier than the alternatives. Adopters include groups at SRI and the Naval Research Laboratory, at Oxford and Cambridge, and in Belgium." Authors from four MITRE Centers submitted a total of 21 papers to this year's competition. In addition to the two Best Paper winners, 16 papers received Incentive Awards, and two shorter papers received Communication Awards. A full listing of the 2002 award winners, many of which include abstracts of the entries and links to the full papers, follows. Award Winners
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