ZISC report 2024 is published!

The ZISC center has published its annual report for 2024. During this year, ZISC continued to work on its core mission which is work on significant and fundamental information security and privacy problems together with is industry partners. Particular topics of focus this year included the research on sovereign smartphone platform, email phishing in large

Stealing Part of a Production Language Model

Researchers from the SPY Lab led by Professor Florian Tramèr along with collaborators have succeeded in extracting secret information on the large language model behind ChatGPT. The team responsibly disclosed the results of their “model stealing attack” to OpenAI. Following the disclosure, the company immediately implemented countermeasures to protect the model. This work represents the

Artificial Bugs for Enhanced Cybersecurity

One-fifth of all cyberattacks target the financial sector, a share that is widely expected to rise. As cyberattacks become more frequent, the quantification and measurement of cyber risk and uncertainty will become pressing issues for policymakers. ZISC supported research from Hans Gersbach and Fikri Pitsuwan that discusses the benefits of ‘bug bounty’ programmes, in which

Ahoi Attacks: Disrupting TEEs with Malicious Notifications

Over the past decade, hardware manufacturers have introduced special support to enable cloud users to safely perform computation on untrusted cloud deployments. This technology, called confidential computing, provides cloud users with guarantees about the applications that they execute and confidentiality and integrity for the data. Currently, confidential computing is employed across various sectors including finance,

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

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: Doctoral Fellowships (up to 4 years plus 1-​year potential extension): deadline on February 23rd, 2024 (17:00 CET) Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships (up

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