Speaker: L. Jean Camp (Indiana University)
Title: Forgotten Promise, Current Peril, & Future Potential of the Internet Trust Architecture

The seminar will be available for in-person and Zoom participation. If you would like to receive the Zoom link, please register using the “Register” button  (to be added soon)

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) determines the code our computers install, the web sites we recognize as trustworthy, and what apps our phones will accept.   The reliability of the PKI ecosystem depends on the trustworthiness of the Certificate Authorities (CAs), the code, the cryptography, and the selection of keys.  It also depends on the governance structure and human factors. Who decides what roots of trust are shipped as part of browsers and phones, and in the future automobiles, toys, appliances, and airplane components?  How do certificates fail?  Beginning with a machine learning approach to identify failures, then moving to qualitative analyses. I argue for a more nuanced understanding of trust in the Internet ecosystem. The talk includes an overview of emerging standards, current state, and past practice in PKI.

Jean Camp is a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science. Her research focuses on the intersection of human and technical  trust, with the goal of building for end to end empowerment. She was a member of the 2022 class of Fellows of the ACM. She was selected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers in 2018. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the  Advancement of Science in 2017.  She was inducted into Sigma Xi – the national research honor society – in 2017. She is currently employed as a Professor at the Luddy School with appointments in Informatics and Computing Science at Indiana University. She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School where her courses were  also listed in Harvard Law, Harvard Business, and the Engineering Systems Division of MIT. She spent the year after earning my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station after a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics, followed by a MSEE in optoelectronics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.