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...

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...

Trusted Computing gives rise to a new supply of trusted third parties on which distributed systems can potentially rely. They are the secure system components (hardware and software) built into nodes with Trusted Computing capabilities. These trusted third parties may be used for supporting communications in distributed systems. In particular, a trusted third party can check and certify the dat...