Sunday Times University Guide 2013

It's finally that time of the year when the UK university league table came out. The Sunday Times provides one of the most respectable guide in ranking the university with the following criteria.

• Student satisfaction
• Teaching excellence
• Heads and peer assessment
• Research quality
• A-Level points
• Unemployment 
• Firsts and 2:1s awarded
• Dropout rate

The Sunday Times' league table came out as recently as early October 2012. The top ten British universities are depicted below.

Rank number 3, the University of Bath has been highlighted for personal pride only.  haha! It's only because I got both my Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy from there.  ^_^

This is the university's highest ever ranking in the guide, as said here.

Since this blog is about computer science, I feel the need to announce the Sunday Times computer science league table also The top ten British universities for computer science are:

(I have to thank my colleague, Dr.Tom Crick, for this computer science league table.)

The Number of Keys Needed for Secure Sharing on Online Social Networks

Now, that is the title of my paper. It was presented at the 3rd Annual International Conference on Inforcomm Technologies in Competitive Strategies (ICT 2012). The conference was held in Bali, Indonesia in the middle of September 2012.

There were many participants from around the globe, including (but not limited to) USA, Germany, Australia, Finland, Malaysia, India and Thailand (that's me!).  The papers presented there were of good quality. The more interesting ones were on parallel processing using GPU. It was presented by Dr.Ming Ouyang, who is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Louisville, USA. What he said basically was that nowadays comparing a normal CPU with a GPU,the GPU is more suited to parallel processing due to its architecture. I spoke to him afterwards. He said that one of his students used a GPU to process intrusion detection mechanism and the results were pretty impressive. That is, it could run approximately four times faster than running this intrusion detection mechanism on a normal CPU. Having heard that I began to think how interesting it would be to use a GPU to run cryptography and even to carry out cryptanalysis. (Sorry, forgot to say that information and network security is really my research area.)

Anyway, enough about that. Let's talk a little bit about the paper I presented. The paper I presented was titled "The Number of Keys Needed for Secure Sharing on Social Networks." I reason I wrote this paper is because I realised that cryptography had not been widely used in social networks as much as it should be to give better privacy to information. One reason was that the number of keys that needed to be held was large. Therefore, I had to find a way to reduce that number, and this is what this paper was about. 

Below is the abstract of paper. The full version can be read here.

  

Online social networks have become an essential tool for communications these days. With popularity come security problems, especially with information privacy. One way to solve this problem is to use cryptography. However, cryptography on online social networks has not been studied exclusively. Most works have been done on access control. The main issue with cryptography is the number of keys needed to encrypt and decrypt the information. The most obvious number of keys would be to use one key for every user in our group of friends. This is not entirely true as we show here. This paper, therefore, gives an attempt to show that the number of keys needed to achieve secure sharing among friends can in fact be fewer than the number of friends. We also provide proofs of correctness and security to confirm our claim.

This paper was also given the Best Research Paper Award by the Conference.