The Air Force Institute of Technology is very proud to announce that Center for Cyberspace Research student Capt. Cory Antosh, who presented at the 1^st Annual Workshop on Information and Data Assurance, won the “Best Paper” award for his paper entitled “The Scalability of Secure Lock.” The workshop was held in conjunction with the 27^th Annual IEEE Performance Computing and Communications Conference in Austin, Texas, on 7 December.

Capt. Antosh’s research, advised by Dr. Barry Mullins, quantified the performance of securing network communications with a technique known as Secure Lock. Secure Lock implements a method to securely send information to multiple authorized recipients using a single unique message. Each Secure Lock message is constructed such that only authorized recipients are able unlock the message. As the number of recipients increases, the size of the Secure Lock message grows in size, consuming more time and memory space to generate. Using a Java simulation he wrote, Antosh quantified the linear relationship between the number of recipients and the size of the Secure Lock message. He also quantified the exponential relationships between the number of recipients and both the amount of memory space and time used to create the Secure Lock. Furthermore, Antosh identified the vulnerability of Secure Lock to brute force attacks. Antosh’s research will help future network designers considering the use of Secure Lock.