Richard T. Carback III
12 noon–1pm
Friday, October 4, 2024
Remotely via WebEx: https://umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman
Abstract:
Much of our lives are digitized and recorded by centralized entities. The economic incentives to exploit these data, and the
massive data breaches facilitated by centralization, continue to result in privacy violations of unprecedented scale. To
protect consumers, some platforms promise end-to-end encryption to limit access to message content, but most of the
value comes from metadata—the who, what, when, where, and how details of any message or activity.
Anonymity systems promise greater protection for these metadata, but few exist in production and their user bases are
small. In this talk, we discuss xx network’s privacy-protecting communication layer that is powered by a decentralized
implementation of cMix, a mixnet protocol for anonymous communications. This platform was deployed almost three
years ago and features over 370 nodes performing continuous mix operations at scale. We will provide an overview of the
architecture of the platform, how it differs from the original cMix paper, the challenges involved, and a walkthrough of
the entire xx development kit (xxDK) stack including a live demonstration.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Richard Carback is a cryptographer and digital privacy advocate. He is a cofounder of the xx network, a blockchain
project focused around mix network based messaging with post-quantum signature capabilities. Richard is a UMBC
Alumnus (CS PhD, 2010) in cryptography and computer security who has built a SaaS CVE scanner, novel crypto
messaging platforms, election systems, and embedded security tools.
In his previous role, Dr. Carback cofounded Lexumo, which spun out of the embedded systems security group he led at
Charles Stark Draper Laboratories. At UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance, he worked with Alan Sherman on Scantegrity, a practical end-to-end voter verifiable election system.
Host:
Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu
Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.
The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1pm. All meetings are open to the public.
Upcoming CDL meetings:
October 18, Vandana Janeja (IS, UMBC), Deep Fakes
November 1 [1-2pm], Keke Chen (CSEE, UMBC), Privacy scoring for machine learning
November 15, Houbing Song (IS, UMBC)
December 6, Zhiuan Chen (IS, UMBC), Privacy