CARDIS 2015 in Bochum

CARDIS is the longest running international conference dedicated to smart card security. CARDIS started in 1994 and was held bi-annually until 2012. Starting in 2013, it was turned into a yearly event. This year's CARDIS was hosted by the ECRYPT member Ruhr University Bochum. The program co-chairs were Naofumi Homma from Tohoku University and Marcel Medwed from NXP, and the General Co-Chairs were Tim Güneysu, Amir Moradi and Christof Paar. There were 71 participants from 10 countries. The split between participants from academia and industry was roughly 44% vs. 56%. 

CARDIS 2015 had 40 submitted papers out of which 17 were accepted. The accepted papers span a wide spectrum of topics, including side-channel and fault attacks, implementation techniques, evaluation tools and Java cards. Two highlights were the invited talks by Sebastian Faust on Leakage Resilient Masking Schemes and by Brecht Wyseur on White-Box Cryptography for smart cards.

In addition to the technical program, the participants greatly enjoyed the social program. The first evening was spent visiting the Fiege brewery, which has cult-like status in Bochum, and the second night included a visit to the German Mining Museum and the gala dinner.

Text by Amir Moradi and Christof Paar.

Hi from Raz

Almost 50 years ago, a visionary psychologist, Stanley Milgram, questioned the scientific world with a small-world problem that was later named as the Six Degree Of Separation experiment. He sent several packages to 160 randomly chosen persons living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend who they thought would bring it closer to the destination: Boston, Massachusetts. Milgram tracked the packages and found out that the average distance (in terms of persons) between the sender and the receiver was five (resulting in six degrees of separation).

Two years later, ARPANET became one of the first operational computer networks. Meanwhile, more and more computer networks were interconnected and their size gave birth to new questions related to Milgram's experiment: by 2015, it is reported that 43% of world's population is using the Internet and the estimated degree of separation between two users of a notorious social network is 4. Why is this possible? Simply, because there is a set of tools (browsers, scripting/markup languages) allowing people to communicate and explore the extending virtual jungle (the Internet). Nowadays, many Internet users store data online through storage providers and more and more questions are related to the privacy of these data.

The main topic of my research project is functional encryption and the fundamental question that motivated my project is the way we can access the data stored by third parties. As an owner of an email address with emails stored on “cloud”, I would like to prevent a third party reading my messages, while preserving many existing functions (e.g. email searches, enabling spam filters). A desired solution is to have a way to control what a trusted authority should see on the data I store. Functional encryption comes with solutions to this problem. The long-term desired objective of my project is to investigate the potential of functional encryption in tackling such problems.

I consider myself very lucky to work in the Crypto Team - CASCADE, and to be part of the ECRYPT-NET project. I hold a master degree (incorporating bachelor) in Computing.

Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data

This week saw the ECRYPT-CSA meeting on "Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data". After a gentle introduction to SSE, MPC and FHE technology the rest of the meeting was given over to talks discussing how various companies (both big and small) are making use of the these technologies in their product lines, how funding agencies see this space and aspects from a legal point of view. 

As well as providing a forum for people working in this space, the workshop also provided a window for the attending students and post-docs as to how research is turned into products. A lot of time was spent discussing barriers that technology faces and some of the opportunities which are out there. The time is very ripe for such technologies, indeed during the meeting we found out about another start-up in this space from Switzerland. Large companies were represented by Huawei, Microsoft, SAP and Thales. 

The audience at the end of the event were asked to decide which was their favourite talk from an SME, with the vote being decided by a secure MPC protocol. The output of the event will be the final report from the ECRYPT CSA project which horizon scans the opportunities and barriers in this technology.

Hello World! from Matthias

Hello World!

I am ESR5 and I am from Austria. I also go by the name ɱatthias ɱinihold and I have just started as one of the 15 fellows of the ring also known as early stage researchers in the ECRYPT-NET programme :-).


My background is mathematics, but I was always interested in the practical application side of say algebraic number theory and thus I enrolled in courses about cryptography and wrote my bachelor’s thesis at TU Vienna having a look into the Advanced Encryption Standard AES. Then my master’s thesis was about "Linear Codes and Applications in Cryptography" with some examples coded in Sage and the showcase of how multiple scientific fields - ranging from computational complexity theory and discrete mathematics to quantum physics - are combined in cryptography, making it an interesting and interdisciplinary field.


I'm glad to be part of an experienced team here at Ruhr-Universität Bochum under the supervision of Alexander May. The working title for my research as ESR5 @ ECRYPT-NET and thus my PhD-Thesis is Fully Homomorphic Encryption. Additionally to thoroughly dive into that I hope to learn and develop further skills and expertise in related fields over the next 3 years here.

In the caves of Is Zuddas (Sardinia)

In my opinion the exciting part of the ECRYPT-NET project with all it's international participants is that it has the opportunity to shape the future of transparent, easy to use yet secure cryptography accessible to a broad range of people thus taking an important role in our information society.


I am looking forward to working in this dynamic team and maybe this project provides the right environment, guidance and feedback to bring to light gems and fascinating structures within the next 3 years such as the rare aragonites people joining the trip to Is Zuddas (Sardinia) could marvel at recently, metaphorically speaking.


Followers are welcome and to all my fellows, see you soon at our next meeting(s)!


"I'll be back!" (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Bits of me

Ciao a tutti, my name is Marco and I have just started my PhD at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Dr. Elisabeth Oswald and Dr. Martijn Stam, as part of the ECRYPT-NET project.

I come from a small village in the countryside of Milan (Italy) but I also lived in other cities of Italy: I spent three years in Venice where I attended the “Francesco Morosini” Military Naval School, and four years in Trento where I did both my B.Sc. and M.Sc. in mathematics at the University of Trento. In particular, my M.Sc. was focused on applications in cryptography and error-correcting codes and since then I have developed a passion for the subject! However, the experience that persuaded me to do a PhD was an internship I did in STMicroelectronics under the supervision of Ing. Guido Bertoni. There, I had a blurry flavour of what doing research may look like...and I liked it!

My work here can be summarised by the sentence “leakage-resilient lattice-based cryptography”. Indeed the two main aspects are side-channel analysis and lattice-based cryptography, making the project extremely interesting for me: I love to work in an interdisciplinary environment and the fact that many subjects can potentially influence my research really stimulates me. In general, working in such an international and multi-cultural environment is what I have ever wanted from a job: I really look forward to share works and ideas to create something great for the world of tomorrow and when I was told the job involved travels, my answer was “I wouldn't even consider it otherwise”.

I am sure that next three years will be a great experience from both a personal and professional point of view so...let's do it! I look forward to see all other fellows in Tenerife.

Marco

“Здраво” from Danilo as well!

Greetings everybody, I am Danilo (Данило) and I come from Serbia. More specifically, I am from Belgrade, where I have finished all of my previous education. This includes B. Sc. and M. Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computing from the University of Belgrade, at the Department of Electronics. Therefore, the majority of the curriculum I have attended was dedicated to hardware design.

Currently, I am starting a PhD program at COSIC under supervision of Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede. The main area of my research will be lightweight cryptography for passively powered devices. This topic is quite intriguing from the perspective of technical challenges it presents. Considering tradeoffs between price, power consumption, and performance, I find no better words to depict the requirements of modern lightweight cryptography than ones from J. R. R. Tolkien: “As light as a feather and as hard as dragon scales.” On the other hand this topic interests me for the impact it might have for the society of tomorrow. Namely, ranging from RFID tags for access control, to medical implants that use implantees as power sources, these devices have the potential to provide various advantages to everyday life; as long as they are properly protected.

Regarding the ECRYPT-NET project itself, I can say that I am happy to be a part of it for two reasons. Firstly, I see it as a great opportunity to improve my technical knowledge, under supervision of world-renowned experts. Secondly, I salute the social and cultural aspects of working in an international, hence multicultural, group such as this one. All in all, I envision the years that are coming as very fruitful for all of us!

Lastly, I believe that the Summer School in Sardinia was a marvelous welcome to the ECRYPT-NET project, and am looking forward to seeing you all at the next one in Tenerife!

Draft report on "Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis"

Our draft report on "Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis" is now available, and we invite interested parties to provide input and comments on the report.

• Draft Report 

The report discusses the cryptanalytic state of the art for post-quantum cryptography (lattices) and recents attacks on candidates for multilinear maps and indistinguishability obfuscation.

The report has been edited by Gottfriend Herold and Alexander May, after collecting input from a number of internationally renowned experts in the field. The report will be finalized after feedback.

The workshop's website also contains links to the slides and videos of all presentations.

• Workshop on Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis