Events & News

ZISC organizes a number events. The annual ZISC Workshop brings together leading experts to present and discuss their latest research results on a chosen information security and privacy topics. The weekly ZISC Lunch Seminar presentations illustrate the research done at the affiliated research groups and invite exciting speakers from other research institutes and companies.

Latest News

Professor Ueli Maurer chosen as SATW member

For his fundamental contributions to cryptography and information security, Professor Ueli Maurer from the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science has been appointed Full Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW).

The Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW is the most important network of experts for engineering sciences in Switzerland and is in contact with the highest Swiss bodies for science, politics and industry. The network comprises elected individual members, member organisations and experts. Individual members are outstanding experts from the fields of education, research, commerce and industry and politics.

Ueli Maurer is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He heads the Information Security and Cryptography research group at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science. Maurer’s research interests include information security, the theory and applications of cryptography, applications like digital signatures, public-​key infrastructures, digital payment systems, and e-​voting, the management of trust and digital evidence, mathematical security proofs, theoretical computer science, discrete mathematics, and information theory.

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You can reed the whole article here.

Impressions from the ZISC 20-years anniversary celebration!

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!

9th Call for Proposals for CYD Fellowships

In order to promote research and innovation in cyber-defence, our partners EPFL and Cyber-Defence (CYD) Campus are now opening calls for different fellowship opportunities aimed at Master, Doctoral and Postdoctoral researchers as well as future entrepreneurs:

Both new applications and re-submissions are encouraged.

The CYD Fellowships are supported by armasuisse Science and Technology. For more information contact the EPFL Research Office (research@epfl.ch) or visit the CYD Fellowships dedicated website: https://www.epfl.ch/research/funding/epfl-programmes/cyd/.

ZISC Report 2023 is published

During the year 2023, the ZISC center concentrated on the disruption caused by the rapid emergence of new technologies, such as generative A. I. tools and quantum computing, as well as several geopolitical reasons.

Bearing these in mind, the research highlight of this past year also reflected these topics, such as the frightening pace at which generative machine learning is progressing or the recent buzz surrounding the Metaverse and NFTs that leads to a steady gaining of popularity of Web3.

The ZISC Center is proud to support the Center of Computer Science Education (ABZ) of ETH Zurich. The ABZ was established with the goal to introduce computer science as a subject into school education with its main activities being developing text-books and online platforms for teaching computer science on all levels of schools and testing them in school, training teachers, popularization of computer science in the whole society, and supporting pupils for different CS competitions.

You can read our full report here.

The ZISC center thanks its partners and collaborators and is looking forward to 2024!