Dr. Stephen V. Providence has been member of the faculty in the position of Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hampton University since the Fall 2006. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University for five years.  He has given presentations at Appalachian State University and North Carolina A&T State University.  He has been Co-PI on several funded research and education projects.   

Dr. Providence has Ph.D. (2000), Ph.M. (1998) and M.S. (1988) degrees in Computer Science from the City University of New York and a B.A. (1986) degree from Lehman College majoring in Computer Science, Mathematics and Music. Dr. Providence has numerous research interests, ranging from parallel digital signal processing to cellular automata applied to bio-informatics.  He regularly collaborates with faculty in computer science, physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics.  His current research is centered on high performance computing and parallel algorithms for investigations into novel super-fast linear algebra libraries using MPI and BLAS and he is investigating McEliece cryptosystem feasibility.

Dr. Providence is a Professional Member of the ACM Special Interest Group in Algorithms and Computation Theory, Member of the IEEE Computer Society and Signal Processing Society and a Member since 1992 of the Scientific Research Society – Sigma Xi.

Presentation

An Introduction to Coding Theory and the Promise of the McEliece Cryptosystem

Abstract: The purpose of this talk is to introduce coding theory with some emphasis on error-correcting codes as it pertains to the McEliece Cryptosystem.  We describe the fundamental premise put forth by Claude Shannon in 1948 with regard to Information Theory. In his classic paper, A mathematical theory of communication, he writes, “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point”.

This idea is important in Information Assurance as the phrase reproducing exactly can be modified to state, reproduce securely. We quickly describe linear, cyclic, BCH and Reed-Solomon codes as a jumping off point for the next topic of Rivest, Shamir and Adelson (RSA) encryption and explain its’ vulnerability and how in principle the McEliece Cryptosystem is invulnerable or impervious to the brute force attack that is yet to come against RSA by a quantum computer. We conclude this talk with a theory of how to reduce by lossless and numerically stable compression, the large encryption keys produced by McEliece and our attempt to make feasible this method for secure data transfer.