Project Grant 2247306

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) will provide research and development services under a $240,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering program. Over a three-year period ending in April 2026, Virginia Tech researchers will design efficient revocation mechanisms for the web public key infrastructure and potentially transform certificate revocation on the web and beyond. They will focus on deploying cryptographic accumulators to improve practicality and reach of revocation mechanisms for Transport Layer Security certificates in the web PKI. Researchers will also work on revocation in code-signing PKI by deploying batching and aggregation techniques on cryptographic accumulators for efficient software validity checks. Finally, the project will address privacy issues when checking revocation and design solutions that can safeguard user privacy in Internet-of-Things connected communities. All proposed protocols will be implemented, evaluated, and compared with existing techniques by integrating the accumulator protocols into real systems to test performance in real-world settings.