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

Focus for 2009

The next will be discussed during the first seminar. 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.)

Registered students:

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.

Helger Lipmaa

Dan Bogdanov

Ahto Buldas

Peeter Laud

Peeter Laud's main research interests lay in the methods for giving cryptographically sound proofs of protocols. There exists a tool that I'm still developing together with my PhD student Ilja Tšahhirov.

I can offer topics on the analysis of cryptographic protocols (either in a cryptographically sound way or not). The seminar work can lead to a master's thesis in the form of an add-on to the tool, or an independent proof of certain properties for some protocols.

Alternatively, the seminar topic could also be a study of protocols for a certain application area, with the master's thesis leading to that study being formalized for the protocol analyser.

A protocol analysis can also be done using the universally composable cryptographic library. The library will be introduced in the lecture for cryptographic protocols, but the seminar work could be a study of some protocols, with the master's thesis being about extending the library to make the analyses of these protocols possible with the help of that library.

Another possible topic for master's theses is the study of theoretical underpinnings of the aforementioned library, and modularizing its security proof.

My other research interest has been secure information flow in programming languages. A program whose inputs and outputs have been partitioned into different security classes has secure information flow if the high-security inputs do not affect low-security outputs. In practice, this definition is too restrictive and declassification is needed. In the seminar work we can study declassification, and in the master's thesis try to find out how nicely the studied ideas go together with cryptographic primitives used in the programs.

And if anyone is interested in studying agent logics (formal frameworks to argue about wishes and obligations and beliefs and ... of agents) then we can do that, too. I'm sure that for the master's thesis, we will find some cryptographic aspects out of it.

Sven Laur

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] [Autumn 2008 @Tartu]


This page: http://research.cyber.ee/~lipmaa/teaching/MTAT.07.006/