Date: Thursday, 21-Nov-96 23:21:03 GMT Server: NCSA/1.3 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thursday, 14-Nov-96 01:01:31 GMT Content-length: 5294 Lewis McCarthy

Lewis McCarthy (lmccarth@cs.umass.edu)

I am a doctoral candidate in the Theory Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (aka UMass). My research interests include cryptography (in particular, the design and analysis of key exchange and authentication protocols) and symbolic computation. My thesis advisor is Susan Landau.

In May 1993 I received a B.S. with Distinction from the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, and I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the department for the 1995-96 academic year.

I have a low security PGP public key.

As of September 23, 1996 at about 10:35 AM EST, I looked like this (400x400 JPEG). My hair is usually much shorter than it appears in this photo.

311/611 TA Work

During the Fall 1996 semester I'm working as the TA for both CMPSCI 311(391) and CMPSCI 611. Click here for more information. Please send course-related email to my EdLab account, lmccarth@elux3.cs.umass.edu.

Secure Mobility / Mobile Security

This semester I'm taking Prof. Krithi Ramamritham's seminar on mobile computing. Alex Specker and I are concentrating on research issues in mobile security (or, as I prefer to put it, secure mobility). We are compiling an eternally incomplete, partially annotated bibliography of references to papers on security in mobile computing systems.

Work in Symbolic Computation

As part of my qualification for Ph.D. candidacy, I completed a synthesis project. My synthesis paper, "Typing for Interactive Symbolic Computation" (240k PostScript), explores the relative merits of the data typing schemes in the symbolic computation systems Macsyma, Maple, and GAP (Groups, Algorithms, and Programming), and suggests some alternatives.

Susan Landau and I are collaborating on an efficient implementation in Maple of the Landau/Miller `85 polynomial-time decision procedure for determining the solvability of a polynomial by radicals.

Other Security-Related Activities

I manage the Coderpunks mailing list, where the implementation of strong, robust, and practical cryptosystems is discussed.

I am a charter member of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, which sponsors a monthly speaking series at The Harvard Club. Here are Bob Hettinga's directions to the Harvard Club.

Miscellaneous Crypto-Related Writing

I pointed out some weaknesses of authorization schemes based on password encryption with crypt(3) and based on PGP signatures that were proposed for Internet domain contact record changes in the InterNIC Guardian Object Draft v.1.

Personal Links

I'm also interested in some Web sites unrelated to my research.


lmccarth@cs.umass.edu maintains Web pages in the www.cs.umass.edu/~lmccarth hierarchy. www-admin@cs.umass.edu maintains the Computer Science department Web pages.

Last substantive update: November 13, 1996