John Bethencourt

General

I am currently a Ph.D. student in computer science at Berkeley, where I am advised by Dawn Song and supported by NSF and NDSEG graduate research fellowships. I spent my first two years of grad school at CMU before my advisor moved to Berkeley and I transfered along with her. I got my B.S. in 2005 from the University of Wisconsin with majors in computer science, math, and computer engineering. I've also spent summers at SRI and the IBM Almaden Research Center. My research interests include cryptography and security.

Publications

• New Techniques for Private Stream Searching ,
  John Bethencourt, Dawn Song, and Brent Waters.
  ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) 12 (3) , January 2009.
• Analysis-Resistant Malware ,
  John Bethencourt, Dawn Song, and Brent Waters.
  Presented at the 15th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) , February 2008.
  This version has been updated to cite some important related work.
• Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (pdf),
  John Bethencourt, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters.
  Presented at the 28th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) , May 2007.
• Multi-Dimensional Range Query over Encrypted Data (pdf),
  Elaine Shi, John Bethencourt, Hubert Chan, Dawn Song, and Adrian Perrig.
  Presented at the 28th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) , May 2007.
  See also the more complete tech report version: CMU-CS-06-135R (pdf).
• Cryptographic Methods for Storing Ballots on a Voting Machine (pdf),
  John Bethencourt, Dan Boneh, and Brent Waters.
  Presented at the 14th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) , February 2007.
  A brief preview talk on this work was given at the Crypto 2006 rump session.
• New Constructions and Practical Applications for Private Stream Searching (Extended Abstract) , slides),
  John Bethencourt, Dawn Song, and Brent Waters.
  Presented at the 27th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) , May 2006.
  This was an early version of some of the results from the later TISSEC paper.
• Mapping Internet Sensors with Probe Response Attacks (pdf, slides),
  John Bethencourt, Jason Franklin, and Mary Vernon.
  Presented at the 14th USENIX Security Symposium , August 2005.
  Received the best paper award!
  Press: New Scientist ZDNet Information Week Slashdot .
• Running Quake II on a Grid ,
  Glenn Deen, Matthew Hammer, John Bethencourt, Iris Eiron, John Thomas, and James Kaufman.
  IBM Systems Journal 45, No. 1 , pp. 21-44, January 2006.
  Press: Technology Review eWeek Slashdot 1 Slashdot 2 .

Code

A while ago I helped Brent Waters create a website called the Advanced Crypto Software Collection (ACSC).

The idea of the ACSC is to help bring very recent, sophisticated cryptographic schemes (i.e., stuff that can't be done with plain old PKI) into a more concrete setting by providing implementations. It consists of a number of original and preexisting projects collected into one place with descriptions, tutorials, and source code. Hopefully, it will prove useful to systems security researchers who would like to explores uses of advanced cryptography in their projects without getting bogged down in the number theory and algebra necessary to implement them. The following projects of mine are included (all with GPL source).

• Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption
• Private Stream Searching Toolkit
• Paillier Library

Posters and Miscellaneous Slides

• Establishing Darknet Connections: An Evaluation of Usability and Security,
  John Bethencourt, Wai Yong Low, Isaac Simmons, and Matthew Williamson.
  A poster (pdf, odp) and accompanying abstract (ps, pdf) presented the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) , July 2007.
• Intro to Bilinear Maps (latex),
  John Bethencourt.
  Just the slides from a reading group meeting in March 2006. Feel free to use these for any purpose (I put them in the public domain). Corrections and updates appreciated.
• Evaluating of the Benefits of Log Sharing , (pdf)
  John Bethencourt, Jason Franklin, and Mary Vernon.
  Presented at a PI meeting for the DoD Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) program, May 2004.

Links

• Free Software Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• American Civil Liberties Union

Quote of the Day

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand children's time ... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

- Carl Sagan

You may also like to see some other pages of mine, including my academic genealogy. I also keep a cv / resume (ps, pdf, tex).