Decentralized Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether have become popular over the last few years, a development that has not gone unnoticed by central banks. Due to this popularity, as well as the increasing digitalization of payments and the constantly reducing role of cash in society, central banks around the world are increasingly interested in
Cookie banners are fooling users into consent and the websites do not respect user choices. ETH researchers show the prevalence of this deceptive website behavior and developed a solution: a browser extension CookieBlock that uses machine learning to protect user’s privacy. Cookies make web browsing stateful. They enable websites’ customization and authenticated sections. However, they
Members of the ETH community who need a fast, secure and reliable internet connection for their data now have an alternative: SCION network technology, invented at ETH Zurich, is now also available to any ETH lecturers, researchers or employees with special security, performance or reliability requirements. SCION is a fast, secure and reliable alternative to
The IEEE Fellow Committee announced the newly elevated IEEE Fellows of 2021 — amongst them is ZISC faculty member and ETHZ Professor Adrian Perrig. This distinction recognises the extensive research and outstanding accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Adrian Perrig has been named IEEE Fellow for his contributions to network and system security. Perrig’s research
With the year 2021 being a challenging one in regards to the ongoing Covid situation, our ZISC researchers still continued their excellent work and were able to deliver promising results in both main mandates: applied research projects with the industry partners and long-term basic research. Our researchers and partner companies worked on multiple projects and
An international research team whose members include ETH Zurich Assistant Professor Shweta Shinde has revealed a vulnerability in the security architecture of Intel processors. A few years ago, Intel, the world’s leading supplier of PC microprocessors, introduced an improvement that promised greater data security: Software Guard Extensions (SGX). These are hardware-based control mechanisms that ensure
Prof. David Basin, Dr. Ralf Sasse and Dr. Jorge Toro-Pozo received the Best Practical Paper Award at the 2021 edition of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for their work on novel attacks against the EMV standard. Their paper “The EMV Standard: Break, Fix, Verify” discusses vulnerabilities on payment protocols used widely by some
EMV is the global standard for payment with credit cards and used in over 9 billion payment cards worldwide. Most EMV transactions require online authorization by the card issuer. Namely, the merchant’s payment terminal sends an authorization request from its acquirer bank to the card issuer over a payment network, typically operated by the company
The growing cyber threats are shaking the foundations of Internet-based services that have become essential in today’s society, culture, economy, and politics. In particular, in the field of financial services, which is witnessing a rapid migration from offline to online, secure and reliable communication is a key consideration. The Network Security Group (Prof. Adrian Perrig),
Researchers from the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zürich are part of a team who recently published a research paper investigating the security of Telegram, a popular “messaging app with a focus on security and speed”, claiming to offer “heavily encrypted” messaging (citing https://telegram.org, visited on 02.08.2021). Contrary to other messaging apps such as Signal