ATI /
Studies /
MTAT.07.006 Research Seminar in Cryptography
MTAT.07.006 Research Seminar in Cryptography
(3+3 AP = 4.5+4.5 ECTS)
Autumn 2008: Various Topics in Cryptography
[General Information]
[Course description]
[Course Organization]
[Schedule]
[Background]
[OIS]
General Information
- Seminars lead by Helger Lipmaa. Office 334. Office hours: by appointment.
- Time and room: Wednesday 12:15-13:45, room 315
. The first
seminar is on 03.09.2008
- Course material: papers and surveys on the subjects (see schedule). More information follows later.
- To pass the course: see Course Organization
(http://research.cyber.ee/~lipmaa/teaching/MTAT.07.006/organization.php)
- Mailing list: teadus dot crypto at lists dot ut dot ee. No
brochure in Estonian. No exams.
Focus for 2008
The seminar series will not have a concrete focus. Instead, various
supervisors propose their topics for interested students. The supervisors
mainly choose topics that are interesting for themselves, which in
particular means that they are in most cases able to continue
supervision also after the seminar to the end of a potential MSc (or
BSc/PhD?) thesis. Such continuation is however not mandatory.
Students can also propose their own topics, but in this case they have
to find a supervisor who is interested in supervision.
Some topics require previous knowledge of cryptography, but other topics
will be accessible to students who take Crypto I in parallel (although, some
independent work is to be expected in this case).
This course is obligatory for our NordSecMob master students.
Everybody else is also more than welcome.
Signing up for the seminar
Fastest way: use OIS. If you
do not manage - don't blame me, OIS was not programmed for human usage. (You
probably have to email Ülle Holm who will then manually register you.)
Students with topics (email me when you are not here or this information is incorrect):
- Sadek Ferdous, supervised by Dan Bogdanov/Sven Laur - Implementing e-Auctions with Sharemind
- Sachin Gaur, supervised by Dan Bogdanov - Practical security analysis and business applications of Sharemind
- Aleksei Gornői, supervised by Dan Bogdanov - Extending Sharemind to n participants
- Silver Holmar, supervised by Peeter Laud - An overview of secure real-time transport protocol: SRTP & ZRTP
- Gerardo Iglesias, supervised by Dan Bogdanov/Sven Laur - e-voting in Sharemind
- Katharina Kahrs, supervised by Sven Laur - Secret Sharing
- Mihkel Kree, supervised by Helger Lipmaa - Quantum hacking: attacking practical quantum key distribution systems
- Ilja Livenson, supervised by Dan Bogdanov - A suite of protocols for a peer-to-peer virtual world
- Hoang Anh Nguyen, supervised by Peeter Laud - Cryptographic Protocol Analysis - e-Auction
- Richard Sassoon, supervised by Dan Bogdanov - privacy preserving with sharemind
- Ivo Seeba, supervised by Peeter Laud - Game-Playing Proofs
Proposed Topics (sorted by supervisor)
For most of the topics, browse the corresponding section of Helger's Cryptopointers to
find links to papers, surveys etc.
List of the supervisors follows. Click
on the name of the supervisor for topics proposed by the concrete
supervisor.
I am able to supervise up to 3 students. It is highly
recommended though not necessary that students continue on those topics to
finish a MSc/PhD thesis.
- Efficient cryptocomputing
- Consider a client-server scenario where client asks some complex query
from the server, with additional privacy requirement that server is
oblivious to the specifics of the query. For example, client gets to know
whether some database element (e.g., a fingerprint template) is close to
client's input (concrete fingerprint data), without the server getting to
know either client's input or which database element it was compared to.
Such cryptocomputing protocols have obviously wide applications. I've done
recently a lot of research on this topic, and I'd like to involve some of
the students too.
Goal: study my recent
eprint (I'll rewrite it in the near future), and try to improve on it.
Requires: good mathematical background, ability to learn some key concepts
of cryptography and theoretical computer science; MSC almost a must.
- Privacy-preserving data mining
- The primary task of data mining is to develop models about aggregated
data, for example bout the habits of the Internet users, about the loyal
customers, etc. The main question of privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM)
is, can we develop accurate models without access to precise information in
individual data records? The latter question has proven to be difficult to
solve.
Goal: study some existing PPDM methods (primarily cryptographic
techniques). Requires: good mathematical background, ability to learn some
key concepts of cryptography and data mining.
See seminar in
Finland (2003) with a lot of links. Helger's cryptopointers
on PPDM.
- E-voting
- E-voting protocols enable to securely vote over the
internet. In particular, Estonia has e-voting.
Goal: Survey some of the secure systems; show what kind of security is
possible or impossible to achieve. Show that the Estonian e-voting systems
are not secure even in the sense of possible goals. Requires: good
understanding of real-world security issues, ability to learn some key
concepts of cryptography.
Some links: http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/, http://www.valimised.ee/
- IND-CCA2 secure cryptosystems
- The standard security assumption
of public-key cryptosystems is that they are IND-CCA2 secure. The first such
cryptosystem that is secure under reasonable assumptions was proposed by
Cramer and Shoup in 1998.
Goal: Survey some recent
works on this area. Requires: good mathematical background, ability to
learn some key concepts of cryptography.
Links
Review form.
Want to know something about subject? Browse the link collection at
http://research.cyber.ee/~lipmaa/crypto/.
Previous years:
[Autumn 2001 @TKK] [Autumn 2002 @TKK] [Autumn 2003 @TKK] [Autumn 2004 @TKK]
[Autumn 2005 @Tartu]
This page: http://research.cyber.ee/~lipmaa/teaching/MTAT.07.006/