People
Faculty Members
Agnes H. Chan |
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Professor Chan focuses on cryptography and communication security. In particular, she researches efficient algorithms for generating symmetric keys and analyzes their security. She has also worked on designing divisible electronic cash (e-cash), which often requires exact payment in cash transactions and is more efficient when subdivided into smaller denominations to be spent independently. Professor Chan's divisible e-cash design satisfies these constraints and allows efficient implementation.
With private communications carried out via public channels, security and integrity are increasingly important issues in designing coding schemes. Professor Chan's research considers coding schemes that are easy to implement, make it difficult for others to eavesdrop, and are resilient to noise interference.
Now generating pseudorandom sequences for ultrafast networks, Professor Chan continues to study sequences generated by nonlinear feedback shift registers. With researchers at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, she has considered use of nonlinear feedback functions to design an ultrafast optical feedback shift register sequence generator to encrypt large, bursty files for transmission through optical TDM networks.
In a related project on mobile communication, Professor Chan is examining fast, efficient algorithms to generate encryption keys for voice and data security. Currently, she is working on a fast algorithm for software implementation.
Professor Chan holds two patents, one related to generating ultrafast pseudorandom sequences and the other to divisible electronic cash. She serves on the editorial board of Cryptologia and is active in promoting interest in science and engineering among women.
Career Publication Highlights
Chan, Agnes H., and Richard A. Games. 1990. On the linear span of binary sequences obtained from q-ary m-sequences, q odd. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 36:548-552.
---. 1993. On the quadratic complexity of binary sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 39:177-183.
Chan, Agnes H., Muriel Medard, John D. Moores, Katie A. Hall, Kristin A. Rauschenbach, and Salil Parikh. 1998. Ultrafast cryptography using optical logic in reconfigurable feedback shift registers. SPIE 3228 (February): 342-353