Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC) was established in 2003 to bring academia and industry together to address the information security challenges of tomorrow. Today, this mission remains more relevant than ever.
On March 6, 2024, we celebrated the 20 years of the ZISC center with a special event and a networking Apero at ETH Zurich’s Audi Max and Dozentenfoyer.
In the event, Prof. Srdjan Capkun, the Chair of the center, provided a brief history of the center and an overview of its main achievements. This talk included many research highlights contributed by ZISC researchers over the years.
The keynote speaker of the event was Prof. Adi Shamir who is a Turing-award winner and one of the founders of modern cryptography. Adi Shamir has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of information security and privacy. In this event he was talking about his latest work regarding attacks on AI models.
In addition, the audience received research talks from Prof. Kenny Paterson and Prof. Florian Tramèr, both from ETH Zurich and part of the ZISC faculty. Kenny Paterson is a renowned expert in applied cryptography and his talk focused on attacks on end-to-end encrypted cloud storage systems. Florian Tramèr is an expert in AI security and privacy. His talk included fascinating examples of security issues in large language models.
The industry talk of the event was given by Mona Vij from Intel Labs. She is well-know experts in the topics of secure cloud computing and trusted execution environments. Her talk provided valuable insights on where the industry is heading with these important technologies.
Finally, the event included a panel discussion hosted by Srdjan Capkun. The panelists included Kenny Paterson, Mona Vij, Adi Shamir and Florian Schütz, who is the Director of the Swiss National Cyber Security center, acting there as a contact point for politicians, media and the general public in various matters of cyber security. The panel discussion touched upon many challenging and controversial topics, including surveillance and interception of encrypted communication, existential risks of AI, and practical usefulness of quantum key distribution.
The event was hosted by Dr. Kari Kostiainen who is the Director of ZISC center.
The evening ended with a networking Apero at the Dozentenfoyer of ETH Zurich. The ZISC center would like to thank all the people who joined us for this special celebration. The ZISC center would also like to thank its sponsors for all the support over the past 20 years. Thank you!
