Events & News

Congratulations to the ZISC chair Srdjan Čapkun and to the ZISC faculty member Adrian Perrig on receiving European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants!

The European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants rank among the most prestigious research awards available to scientists at European universities. Through these grants, the ERC supports ambitious, high-risk research projects with the potential to push the frontiers of knowledge. Each grant provides up to €2.5 million (approximately CHF 2.3 million), with additional funding available where needed for major research infrastructure.

Awarded through an exceptionally competitive selection process based solely on scientific excellence, ERC Advanced Grants are both a significant source of research funding and a mark of personal distinction. They recognize researchers with outstanding scientific achievements and international leadership in their fields. Receiving an ERC Advanced Grant is often compared to reaching the Champions League final in football—a recognition reserved for those performing at the very highest level.

This is an outstanding achievement for the Department of Information Security and for ZISC!

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:

– Doctoral Fellowships (up to 4 years plus 1-year potential extension): deadline on 19 August 2026 (17:00 CEST).

– Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships (up to two years): deadline on 19 August 2026 (17:00 CEST).

– Master Thesis Fellowships (6 months): open rolling call.

– Proof of concept Fellowship (12 months): open rolling call.

An online applicant workshop will be held on 7 July 2026 (11:00-11:45 CEST). Please register here.

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 website.

A recent publication by the SPY Lab ask how good large language models are at re-identifying anonymous online users. This is a collaboration between Daniel Paleka, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni and Florian Tramèr from ETH Zurich’s Department of Computer Science (D-INFK), together with Simon Lermen (MATS) and Nicholas Carlini (Anthropic).

Although deanonymization is a decades-old idea, pseudonymous accounts on Reddit, Hacker News and similar forums have stayed largely safe — such attacks traditionally needed structured data or hours of manual investigation.

The main insight of the paper is that LLMs change the economics of deanonymization. It is previously known that LLMs can extract identity-relevant features from online comments. Our pipeline extends this to search for candidate matches across platforms, and reasons over them to confirm a match. LLM-based methods massively outperform classical ones, linking accounts to real people for less than $5 each. The takeaway: the more you post, the easier you are to unmask.

The findings received wide press coverage: the ETH D-INFK spotlight, plus Bloomberg, The Guardian, The Verge, El País, CyberScoop and Bruce Schneier internationally, and 20 Minuten, Tages-Anzeiger and Le Temps in Switzerland.

Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Computer Science (D-INFK) have been awarded the prestigious Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography at this year’s Real World Cryptography Conference. The prize recognizes outstanding contributions that have significantly advanced the practical deployment of cryptographic systems.

Professor David Basin and lecturer Ralf Sasse received the award together with Professors Cas Cremers and Jannik Dreier for their work on Tamarin, a leading tool for the formal verification of cryptographic protocols. Cremers and Dreier are former members of ETH Zurich, now serving as Professor at CISPA and Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine, respectively.

The Levchin Prize, established in 2016 through a donation by entrepreneur and computer scientist Max Levchin, is awarded annually to honor innovations that have had a lasting impact on real-world cryptography. Two prizes are presented each year at the Real World Cryptography Conference.

Tamarin originated from research initiated around 2009 within David Basin’s Information Security Group at ETH Zurich. Over time, it evolved into a widely used open-source system for the symbolic analysis of security protocols. The tool enables researchers and practitioners to both identify potential vulnerabilities and construct formal proofs of security.

In addition to the award recipients, early contributions by doctoral researchers Simon Meier and Benedikt Schmidt played a key role in shaping the initial development of Tamarin.

Today, Tamarin is used to analyze and verify real-world protocols and standards, including 5G, TLS, EMV, and iMessage PQ3. Its impact on improving the security of widely deployed systems underscores the significance of the team’s achievement.

The Levchin Prize highlights not only the technical excellence behind Tamarin, but also its tangible contribution to strengthening the security of modern digital infrastructure.

The Applied Crypto group’s research on password managers is now public at:

https://webro.ke/passwordmanagers

The paper, to appear at USENIX Security ’26, sees Matteo Scarlata, Giovanni Torrisi (former MSc student in AC, now doctoral student at USI Lugano), Matilda Backendal (former doctoral student in AC, now Professor at USI Lugano) and Kenny Paterson take a “Crypto in The Wild” look at Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password.

Surprisingly, despite their popularity and the importance of the data they protect, password managers were not analysed in depth before.
When considering a malicious server threat model (the de rigueur approach for E2EE protocols), we found “a cornucopia of practical attacks” against the products we analysed.

The findings received wide press coverage: here we are on the ETH main page, on Ars Technica, Risky Biz and Medium