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

8th Call 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 online Applicant Workshop will be held on 20 July 2023 (10-10:45 CEST).

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/services/fund-research/funding-opportunities/fellowship-mobility/cyd-fellowships/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Applied Crypto Group wins Best Paper Award at PKC 2023

The paper “Post-Quantum Anonymity of Kyber” by Varun Maram (ETH Zurich) and Keita Xagawa  (NTT Social Informatics Laboratories, Japan) won the best paper award at PKC23 this month.

The annual conference is one of the top cryptography conferences and was held this year in Atlanta, where Varun accepted the award on behalf of the team. The paper proves the anonymity of Kyber (a key-encapsulation mechanism selected by NIST in its PQC standardization process), and the (hybrid) PKE schemes derived from it, in a post-quantum setting. The paper also provides an approach to obtain tight IND-CCA security proofs for Kyber with concrete bounds and extends the results to Saber.

ZISC Report 2022 is published


During the year 2022, the ZISC center continued to deliver excellent results on both of its main mandates: applied research projects that are jointly defined and customized to the needs of our industry partners, and long-term basic research.

We worked on multiple topics with our partners, addressed fundamental challenges and made substantial contributions to projects that have societal importance beyond academia. The ZISC researchers won numerous awards for their outstanding work,

In 2022, Prof. Florian Tramèr joined the ZISC Faculty as an Assistant Professor in August. His research focuses on the safety and privacy of machine learning which is a highly topical and exciting research area. We warmly welcome Florian to the center and look forward to working with him in the years to come.

You can read the full report here.

The ZISC center wishes all its partners and collaborators a relaxing holiday season and we are looking forward to working with you again in 2023!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ZISC Chair Prof. Srdjan Capkun named IEEE fellow

The IEEE Fellow Committee announced the newly elevated IEEE Fellows of 2022 — amongst them is ZISC Chair and ETHZ Professor Srdjan Capkun.

This distinction is reserved for selected IEEE members with extraordinary accomplishments.

During his career, Prof. Capkun has made numerous significant research contributions in the areas of wireless security and systems security. His ground-breaking research on distance bounding and proximity verification have helped to shape an exciting new research area. These results have also been commercialised by the 3bd. In addition, the research of Prof. Capkun examined cellular systems, such as LET and 5G networks, and identified important security and privacy issues. He was also a part of a team of researchers who designer a privacy-preserving contact tracing system that became the basis for the Swiss Covid App and the Exposure Notification framework adapted by Google and Apple. Prof. Capkun’s research on authentication technologies formed the basis for the Futurae start-up that specialises on secure and user-friendly authentication solutions. He has also created numerous research results related to trusted execution environments, security of microarchitectures, blockchain technology and digital currencies.

The ZISC center congratulates Prof. Capkun on this amazing achievement!

Applied Crypto Group wins Distinguished Paper Award at ACM CCS

The paper “Victory by KO: Attacking OpenPGP Using Key Overwriting” by Lara Bruseghini (ETH Zurich & Proton AG), Daniel Huigens  (Proton AG) and Kenny Paterson (ETH Zurich) won a distinguished paper award at ACM CCS 2022 this week.

The annual conference is one of the top four security conferences and was held this year in Los Angeles, where Lara accepted the award on behalf of the team. The paper has already had a substantial impact on the use of OpenPGP in practice: multiple libraries have updated their code and the OpenPGP standard under development at the IETF now includes the countermeasures recommended in the paper. In addition, the “key overwriting” or “KO” attack vector is proving to be very useful in the group’s follow-up work on cloud storage systems.

To read more about the paper, please visit https://www.kopenpgp.com/