Communication and Third Parties: Costs, Cues, and Confidentiality by Krishnan Eswaran Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering—Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Designated Emphasis in Communication, Computation, and Statistics University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Gastpar, Chair This thesis tells the story of Alice and Bob, who wish to share information. However, Al...

Punishment of defectors and cooperators is prevalent when their behaviour deviates from the social norm. Why atypical behaviour is more likely to be punished than typical behaviour remains unclear. One possible proximate explanation is that individuals simply dislike norm violators. However, an alternative possibility exists: individuals may be more likely to punish atypical behaviour, because ...

We investigate the use of trustworthy devices, which function as trusted third parties (TTPs), to solve general two-party Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) problems. We assume that a really trustworthy TTP device will have very limited protected memory and computation environment—a tiny TTP. This precludes trivial solutions like "just run the function in the TTP". Traditional scrambled circuit e...

We propose a digital signature scheme for dynamic coalitions. Particularly, we enable members to join and leave. Our scheme does not need trusted or oblivious third parties (TTPs or OTPs). In this distributed scheme there is a changing secret group key dependent on the members in the group. Each member’s secret key remains the same for all group compositions. The downside of this approach is th...

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reviewing, endorsing or planning coursework/other institutional needs. You may store and print the file and share it with others helping you with the specified purpose, but under no circumstances may the file be distributed or otherwise made accessible to any other third parties without the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Please contact [email protected] if you have any querie...

Social Q&A (SQA) sites that allow users to exchange knowledge by asking and answering questions in natural language have become increasingly popular due to their ability to leverage the wisdom of crowds and provide personalized answers. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to studying users’ information and knowledge sharing within SQA sites. Past research, however, has neglected use...

This paper presents a new scheme to distribute secret shares using two trusted third parties to increase security and eliminate the dependency on single trusted third party. This protocol for communication between a device and two trusted third parties uses the piggy bank cryptographic paradigm. We also present a protocol to give law enforcing agencies access to sensitive information present on...