Sheueling Chang Shantz

Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems Labs

Sheueling Chang Shantz is a Distinguished Engineer in Sun Microsystems Laboratories. She joined Sun in 1984 with a Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from California Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Taiwan University. She also received a Master in Business Management from Stanford Business School in 1998.

Sheueling is the first woman engineer at Sun promoted to a Distinguished Engineer position. Sheueling's background includes network security,electronic commerce, Internet banking and payment systems, Internet security protocols, and RSA and Elliptic Curve public key cryptographic technologies.

Her current focus is in the area of next generation Internet security infrastructure, which includes efficient implementation and hardware acceleration of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems.

Integrating Elliptic Curve Cryptography into the Web’s Security Infrastructure

RSA is the most widely used public-key cryptosystem on the Web today. This presentation identifies several evolutionary trends for the Web such as the proliferation of smaller, simpler devices and increasing security needs, that will make continued reliance on RSA more challenging over time. It offers Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as a suitable alternative and describes how we have incorporated this technology into several key components of the World Wide Web’s security infrastructure, e.g. OpenSSL, Apache and Mozilla. Sheueling will give a brief overview of the newly standardized Elliptic Curve public-key cryptosystems (ECC) and present experimental results quantifying the performance benefits of using ECC for secure web transactions. She will describe Sun Microsystems’ efforts to promote the adoption and deployment of this next generation cryptographic technology by promoting ECC standardization within SSL, the dominant security protocol used on the Internet, and by integrating ECC cipher suites into OpenSSL and NSS/Mozilla, the two most popular open source cryptographic libraries. She will also describe the research development at Sun Laboratories at using ECC to enable highly constrained devices with 8-bit processors such as the Berkeley/Crossbow Mote to participate in the Internet’s security infrastructure as first-class citizens, i.e. without sacrificing end-to-end security.