Manchester Geometry Seminar 2000/2001


1 February 2001. Room 9.05, Mathematics Building, University of Manchester. 3 p.m.

Information Geometry: Security and Stochastic Clustering

Kit Dodson (UMIST)


dodson@umist.ac.uk

Designers of secure software systems need to monitor and quantify event clustering in order to minimize information leakage to probes by an attacker, perhaps through introduction of obscuring procedures in a restricted memory device such as a smartcard. An ideal situation would be to have scheduling that to an attacker resembles closely a random sequence of events. The basic `random' model for stochastic events is the Poisson process; for events on a line this results in an exponential distribution of intervals between events.

Here we discuss the elementary differential geometry of manifolds of gamma distributions, which contain exponential distributions as a special case; this gives a means of quantifying departures from randomness and from uniformity.


http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/tv/seminar.html