In recent years research in symmetric cryptography has focused on lightweight ciphers, leading even to an open NIST competition dedicated to it. In this talk we take a step back and look at lightweight cryptography from a more historical perspective.

Short bio:

Since March 2015, he is a full professor symmetric cryptography at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Digital Security (DiS) Group and since September 2018 this has become his full-time job. Currently he is head of the DiS group. Until that date, he worked near Brussels, Belgium as a security architect and cryptographer for STMicroelectronics (2003-2018), previously Proton World (1998-2003), previously Banksys (1996-1998), all that time in the security engineering group led by Yves Moulart. Before that he worked shortly at Bacob Bank (1996) in Brussels as a security architect and he spent one year in IT support at J&J (1995-1996) on the Janssen site in Beerse, Belgium. He did a PhD on the design of symmetric cryptography at COSIC in Leuven from 1988 until 1995.

We present our new open bachelor’s thesis topics and award prizes to excellent students who contributed to scientific publications this past year.

If you’re interested in joining us for your bachelor’s thesis in security, this is the best way to get an impression of our topics as well as how a bachelor’s thesis at IAIK works: You’ll hear about our research areas and current hot topics, our Bachelor@IAIK program where you can work on your thesis together with your fellow students in one of our offices if you like, and maybe you’ll get to know your supervisor while chatting along.

The event will also be the kick-off lecture in Introduction to Scientific Working (ISW) where you will be able to choose your preferred topic!   

We are looking forward to meeting you!

Meeting ID (access code): 2733 968 8841 Meeting password: imNugMMt623

Daniele Venturi introduced a new form of encryption that we name matchmaking encryption (ME). Using ME, sender S and receiver R (each with its own attributes) can both specify policies the other party must satisfy in order for the message to be revealed. The main security guarantee is that of privacy-preserving policy matching: During decryption nothing is leaked beyond the fact that a match occurred/did not occur. ME opens up new ways of secretly communicating, and enables several new applications where both participants can specify fine-grained access policies to encrypted data. For instance, in social matchmaking, S can encrypt a file containing his/her personal details and specify a policy so that the file can be decrypted only by his/her ideal partner. On the other end, a receiver R will be able to decrypt the file only if S corresponds to his/her ideal partner defined through a policy. On the theoretical side, we define security for ME, as well as provide generic frameworks for constructing ME from functional encryption. These constructions need to face the technical challenge of simultaneously checking the policies chosen by S and R, to avoid any leakage. On the practical side, we construct an efficient identity-based scheme for equality policies, with provable security in the random oracle model under the standard BDH assumption. We implement and evaluate our scheme and provide experimental evidence that our construction is practical. We also apply identity-based ME to a concrete use case, in particular for creating an anonymous bulletin board over a Tor network.