IAIK at Ball der Technik 2024
On the 26th of January we had the pleasure to be part of Ball der Technik. This year the theme was “Tanz der Algorithmen” (dance of the algorithms) and there was a focus on the research areas of computer science and biomedical technology at TU Graz and FH JOANNEUM. Florian Draschbacher, Lukas Maar, Florian Hirner, Florian Krieger and Hannes Weissteiner represented the IAIK at four booths with the topic “Insecurity of Today meets Security of Tomorrow”.
Mobile phone charging station
At the phone charging booth, the potential security consequences of blindly trusting public charging infrastructure was demonstrated. Although the chargers happily supplied all connected phones with power, they also acted as USB keyboards, autonomously composing an email to a (fictitious) adversary on the connected device. Throughout the night, this attack was demonstrated to all interested ball guests, some surprised about these possibilities, others just happy about a way to charge their phones.
Unsafe Phone
This showcase centered around identifying the least secure mobile phone at the Ball der Technik, with a reward of three bottles of wine for the fortunate user of the least secure device. The assessment focused on the vulnerability of individual components within each device, generating an insecurity score for every phone by which the most insecure phone of the evening was successfully pinpointed.
Crypto Engineering
This booth presented a demo centered around hardware acceleration for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) on both client and server sides, featuring a demonstration that underscored the substantial speed difference between hardware (HW) and software (SW) implementations. The showcased setup revealed a remarkable speedup, demonstrating a performance improvement of one to two orders of magnitude with hardware acceleration, highlighting its efficacy in optimizing FHE processes.
