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• The presentation sessions took place in room 106, building E 1.3 (the laptop room next to the fachschaft and the elevator)
• The schedule of the presentation sessions:
  
  1. Tuesday, 29.01.2008, 10:00-12:30, The Formal Verification of Cryptographic Proofs
  2. Tuesday, 29.01.2008, 14:30-16:30, The Analysis of Electronic Voting Protocols
  3. Wednesday, 30.01.2008, 10:00-12:30, Obfuscation
  4. Wednesday, 30.01.2008, 14:30-16:00, The Secure Implementation of Cryptographic Protocols
  Please come at least 30 minutes BEFORE the session in which you present to set up your laptop or to copy your slides to my laptop. (25.01.2008)
• The participants must meet their advisor before the presentation sessions. (24.01.2008)
• The participants had to send a first version of their slides by the 14th of January. (07.12.2007)
• The presentation sessions will be on the 29th and 30th of January. (07.12.2007)
• The participants had to register in the HISPOS system by December 1st. (13.11.2007)
• The topics and papers have been assigned. (23.10.2007)
• The list of topics and papers is now online. (19.10.2007)
• The requirements for the seminar are now available. (18.10.2007)
• You can pre-register for this seminar by sending an email to catalin.hritcu@gmail.com (16.10.2007)
• The official registration for the seminar will occur at the organizational meeting on Tuesday, October 23.

Description

The seminar addresses current research on information security and cryptography, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective.

Registration

The organizational meeting took place on Tuesday, October 23 and registration for the seminar is now closed. Guests are welcome during the presentation sessions.

Prerequisites

There are no formal requirements for participation. Students should be familiar with basic topics in computer security and cryptography.

Participation in the organization meeting as well as all subsequent presentation sessions is mandatory.

Requirements for obtaining credit points (Scheinvergabe)

The seminar requires both an individual contribution by every participant and a contribution achieved within a team of four people (formed by the speakers of each session).

As far as the individual part is concerned, each participant

• is assigned a research paper that she/he has to present in the class. In order to avoid misunderstandings regarding the presentation of the assigned paper and to have possible questions answered, each participant must have a first version of her/his slides and meet her/his adviser at least two weeks prior to her/his talk (i.e. 14th of January);
• has to read and understand the papers assigned to all the other members of her/his team. Team members will always be assigned papers of similar topic in order to deepen their understanding in the respective area.

The group part requires the team

• to come up with novel research ideas in the respective topic on which the team has been assigned papers. These ideas do not have to constitute outstanding research achievements, but they should be novel in the sense that they complement some of the existing works in some nice fashion;
• to present these novel ideas after the individual talks in the session. The ideas will then be discussed in the class, with one idea being collaboratively chosen as the one that looks most promising and that should be pursued further by the team;
• to work out the details of the selected idea and obtain some results by the end of the term;
• to document the results in a scientific form, using appropriate math and illustrating examples where necessary. As a guideline, the overall extent should be about 12-15 pages when typeset with LaTeX in 11pt font.

You must submit (1) your team report as one Latex source and in PDF format, as well as (2) the final version of your slides, before the end of term. All team reports and presentation slides will be made available on this Web site.

Presentation Sessions

All presentation sessions will be held on the 29th and 30th of January.

Each presentation has been allocated 30 minutes. The length of each talk should be 25 minutes, while the remaining 5 minutes will be used to comment on the content and the quality of the talk. We would like this to be a seminar that participants can profit from, so the main emphasis of the talks must be on being understandable.

Additionally, after the talks of each session the team has allocated 15 minutes to present a list of potentially interesting, scientifically novel ideas, for discussing them in the class, and for agreeing on the idea that the team should work on further.

Topics/Sessions and Papers

• Topic 1: The Formal Verification of Cryptographic Proofs (Final report)
  1. Code-Based Game-Playing Proofs and the Security of Triple Encryption. M. Bellare, P. Rogaway
     Eurocrypt 2006, Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2004/331
     Speaker: Yves Neisius
  2. A plausible approach to computer-aided cryptographic proofs. S. Halevi
     Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2005/181, June 2005
     Speaker: Robert Künnemann
  3. Automated Security Proofs with Sequences of Games. B. Blanchet, D. Pointcheval
     In Proceeding of the 26th Annual International Cryptology Conference, pages 537-554, August 2006.
     Speaker: Jiang, Nanzhu
  4. Formal Certification of Code-Based Cryptographic Proofs. G. Barthe, B. Grégoire, R. Janvier, S. Zanella Béguelin
     Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2007/314, August 2007
     Speaker: Esfandiar Mohammadi

  Advisers: Matthias Berg and Dominique Unruh

• Topic 2: The Analysis of Electronic Voting Protocols (Final report)
  1. A framework and taxonomy for comparison of electronic voting schemes. Krishna Sampigethaya and Radha Poovendran
     Computers & Security, 2006
     Speaker: N/A
  2. Coercion-Resistant Electronic Elections. Ari Juels, Dario Catalano and Markus Jakobsson
     Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, WPES '05, pp. 61-70. 2005.
     Speaker: Sebastian Gerling
  3. Static Validation of a Voting Protocol. Christoffer Rosenkilde Nielsen, Esben Heltoft Andersen and Hanne Riis Nielson
     Second Workshop on Automated Reasoning for Security Protocol Analysis (ARSPA 2005)
     Speaker: GU Xiaoyu
  4. Verifying Privacy-type Properties of Electronic Voting Protocols. Stéphanie Delaune, Steve Kremer and Mark Ryan
     Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science, March 2007
     Speaker: Dominik Jednoralski

  Advisers: Matteo Maffei and Catalin Hritcu

• Topic 3: Obfuscation (Final report)
  1. On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs. B. Barak, O. Goldreich, R. Impagliazzo, S. Rudich, A. Sahai, S. Vadhan, K. Yang.
     CRYPTO '01, ECCC '01, Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2001/069.
     Speaker: Marek Hamerlik
  2. On Obfuscating Point Functions. Hoeteck Wee.
     ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2005
     Speaker: Pascal Peter
  3. Positive Results and Techniques for Obfuscation. Benjamin Lynn, Manoj Prabhakaran and Amit Sahai.
     Eurocrypt 2004, Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2004/060
     Speaker: Holger Bornträger
  4. On Best-Possible Obfuscation. Shafi Goldwasser and Guy Rothblum.
     Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2007)
     Speaker: Christian Engels

  Advisers: Dominique Unruh and Michael Backes

• Topic 4: The Secure Implementation of Cryptographic Protocols (Final report)
  1. Cryptographic Protocol Generation from CAPSL. Jonathan Millen and Frederic Muller
     SRI-CSL-01-07, December 2001, for NSF.
     Speaker: Alex Busenius
  2. An Experiment in Interoperable Cryptographic Protocol Implementation Using Automatic Code Generation. Alfredo Pironti and Riccardo Sisto
     International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2007.
     Speaker: Violeta Ivanova
  3. Verified Interoperable Implementations of Security Protocols. Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Cédric Fournet, Andrew D. Gordon, Stephen Tse
     In 19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW 2006), pp139-152, Venice, July 5-7, 2006.
     Speaker: N/A
  4. Verified Reference Implementations of WS-Security Protocols. Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Cédric Fournet, and Andrew D. Gordon
     In 3rd International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM 2006), pp88-106, Vienna, September 8-9, 2006.
     Speaker: N/A

  Advisers: Catalin Hritcu and Matteo Maffei