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K-State Today

November 30, 2011

University of Texas at Arlington computing science professor to give distinguished lecture today

Submitted by Communications and Marketing

Matthew Wright, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, will present a distinguished lecture at 12:30 p.m. today in 126 Nichols Hall. The department of computing and information sciences hosts the lecture.

In this talk, Wright will describe the Salsa architecture and discuss the general problem of distributed directory services in open systems. Wright will also present Salsa-ReDS (Salsa with Reputation for Directory Services), a simple but powerful way to further improve the robustness of Salsa lookups. Salsa is one of several recent designs for a structured peer-to-peer system that uses path diversity and redundancy to ensure greater robustness from attackers in the lookup process. In Salsa-ReDS, each node tracks the performance of its peers in each lookup and uses that information to gauge the relative reliability of the peers for future lookups. Wright will show in simulation that this technique can greatly reduce the chance of an attacker manipulating the lookup results or maintain the same robustness with lower overhead. Wright will conclude by describing how the ReDS idea can also be applied to other systems and some of the potential pitfalls, challenges, and opportunities for future research in this approach.

Wright graduated with his doctorate from the department of computer science at the University of Massachusetts in May 2005, where he also earned his master's of science in 2002. His dissertation work addresses the robustness of anonymous communications. His other interests include intrusion detection, security and privacy in mobile and ubiquitous systems, and the application of incentives and game theory to security and privacy problems. Previously, he earned his bachelor's of science degree in computer science at Harvey Mudd College.

He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award and the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2002 Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security.

For more information please visit the department's website.