With the expansion of versatile privacy-sensitive RFID applications a clear need for new identification schemes has been established. In the past few years a plentitude of identification protocols has been proposed addressing different real-life scenarios and relying on both symmetric-key and asymmetric-key cryptography. In this talk we first survey some prominent solutions for privacy-sensitive RFID identification protocols and discuss their properties and hardware requirements. In the second part of this talk we discuss hardware requirements for the public-key founded protocols i.e. an ECC-based processor enabling the new solutions.

In this talk, I will present the design of the GNU Name System (GNS), a fully decentralized and censorship-resistant name system.  GNS uses cryptography to provide a privacy-enhancing alternative to DNS and existing public key infrastructures (such as X.509 certificate authorities), while giving users the desirable property of memorable names.  The design of GNS incorporates the possibility of integration and coexistence with DNS. GNS builds on ideas from the Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure (SDSI), addressing a central issue with the decentralized mapping of secure identifiers to memorable names: namely the impossibility of providing a global, secure and memorable mapping without a trusted authority. GNS uses the transitivity in the SDSI design to replace the trusted root with secure delegation of authority, thus making petnames useful to other users, while operating under the strong adversary model represented by authoritarian state actors.

The traditional threat model assumed in the design of communications protocols developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) accounts for an attacker having nearly complete control over the communications channel that connects end systems, but has generally conceptualized attackers as focusing on defined attack targets. The recent surveillance revelations reveal that targeted attacks co-exist with pervasive, untargeted ones. In this seminar we will discuss the implications of this for Internet protocol and architectural design and the associated mitigations being discussed and developed within the IETF.

Insider threats are easy to counter. All we need is a concise model of human behavior and its dependencies on outer and inner influences, a surveillance system in place that is able to observe in necessary detail action and influences, and an evaluation system that can draw the necessary conclusions from its input. Neither of the components just described is easy to realise, or desirable to have in the first place. Modelling human behaviour is close to impossible, let alone modelling how it depends on outer and inner factors. A surveillance system is heavily dependent on legal boundaries of what is allowed to be monitored or not, and the amount of data even from legal monitoring can be overwhelming at best. An evaluation system would need to be able to take all the input and models into account, and this is yet another complex task. In this talk we investigate the notion of insiders and insider threats from different viewpoints. From an organizational viewpoint we derive a definition of how insiders can be characterized. We then develop a theoretical, modular system model that is expressive enough to model real world scenarios, yet simple enough to lend itself for extensions and integration with other techniques. The formal basis enables the development of different analysis techniques to identify possible insider attacks. Finally, we investigate the connection of system models and attacks, and show how to systematically derive attacks from models.

While banks and other organisations struggle to tell the difference between the real person and an identity fraudster, friends and family members who know the real person have no difficulty at all in distinguishing them apart. Thanks to several millennia of human evolution, people can perform this feat reliably, in an instant, even with partial information. Perhaps nobody thought to ask them before, but the means of doing so has now become technologically commonplace and commercially viable. The aim of the New Model Identity project is to harness the natural ability of people to recognise their family and friends so as to eliminate identity fraud. It uses digital media, smartphones or webcams, and carefully choreographed social collaboration. The promise is not only that identity fraud be systemically eliminated, the rigmarole of "proving who you are" through documents, devices, PINs, passwords and pet names also becomes redundant, thereby neutralising the value of such items to fraudsters and making life easier and safer for the honest majority.

The term "Advanced Persistent Threats" (APTs) is hyped in the media as referring to an extremely sophisticated set of groups capable of hacking into any system worldwide. In this talk, I peel back the hype and present the reality of APTs, their capabilities & their goals. I'll present a typical attack methodology used by APTs and discuss their associated tools & tactics.

In the last couple of years amazing advances have been made on techniques to perform computation on encrypted data. Some of the techniques are even becoming practical. In this talk I will show a novel technique which utilizes techniques used in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) schemes to provide efficiency improvements in Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols. No prior knowledge of FHE or MPC will be assumed.

Surveillance of Internet activities and electronic communications of individuals, and of the patterns of their interactivity, affects a whole range of human rights protected by international (global and regional) human rights treaties. It of course directly impacts on the right to privacy (or “private life”) and correspondence. But it also has a clear effect on other rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of information, and freedom of association. In this talk, Prof. Korff will summarise the international law that is applicable to large-scale state interception activities, and how it interacts with national security and counter-terrorism programmes. He will also discuss whether states have obligations to protect the rights of individuals in other jurisdictions.

In this talk I address the issue of authentication in QKE protocols. Typically in the QKE literature this seems to be addressed in a rather off-hand fashion with assertions along the lines of: we assume that the classical channels provide unconditional authentication (but not secrecy). We propose some simple changes to a class of Quantum Key Distribution protocols. The first enhancement ensures entwining of the key establishment and authentication steps and provides early detection of any attempted Man-in-the-Middle attack and results in less leakage of key material to any eavesdropping attacker. We argue that this version is at least as secure as the original BB'84 scheme, but ensures a closer binding of the key establishment and authentication components of the protocol. A further proposed enhancement leads to a doubling of the key rate, but the security arguments become much more delicate.