- 11am, 23 April 2018- Dr Sujoy Sinha Roy
Bio: Sujoy Sinha Roy is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group (COSIC) in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He received the M.S degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research area has been broadly in the field of efficient implementation of public key cryptography.
Talk abstract:
A month ago Google established a landmark in quantum computing by announcing a 72-qubit quantum computer. Quantum computing certainly has the potential to improve our life by performing tasks that are not feasible using today’s computers, such as discovering new drugs and building molecular structures; but it also threatens the existing information security infrastructure. Shor’s algorithm running on a powerful quantum computer can break RSA and elliptic-curve-based cryptographic schemes, which are considered as the two pillars of our present-day public-key infrastructure. The state-of-the-art IBM quantum computer is not powerful enough to break the present-day public-key infrastructure, but the giant leap forecasts, that there might be a powerful quantum computer in the future that will break both schemes. Post-quantum cryptography is a branch of cryptography that focuses on designing schemes that are secure against quantum computing attacks. In recent years, several hard problems from lattice theory have become popular for constructing post-quantum public-key cryptographic schemes. Beside post-quantum cryptography, lattice-problems have been used to construct homomorphic encryption schemes. Homomorphic encryption has applications in privacy-preserving cloud computing: users can upload their encrypted data in the cloud and can still perform computation on the encrypted data. While in theory, lattice-based cryptography offers wide applicability, computational efficiency, and strong security, its real deployment in a wide variety of computing devices and applications faces several challenges. My research is aimed at solving the fundamental problem of implementing cryptography based on hard problems in lattices in hardware and software and on next-generation computing platforms.
In this presentation I will talk about implementation aspects of ring Learning with Errors (ring-LWE) based cryptography. Ring-LWE is a hard problem in lattices. Cryptographic schemes based on the ring-LWE problem perform arithmetic operations in a polynomial ring and require sampling from a discrete Gaussian distribution. I will describe how we designed a lightweight discrete Gaussian sampler based on the Knuth-Yao random walk algorithm. The sampler satisfies a negligible statistical distance to the accurate distribution. For efficient polynomial multiplication, I will show how we used number theoretic transform and performed computational and architectural optimizations to achieve high throughput. From these building blocks, we designed a compact public-key encryption architecture. Next, I will show how we designed countermeasures to protect sensitive information from physical attacks. Physical attacks are a class of attacks that try to break security by observing the physical properties (such as power consumption, electromagnetic radiation etc.) of the computing device. In the end of this presentation, I will briefly describe our experience in designing hardware accelerators for ring-LWE-based homomorphic encryption schemes.
- 11am 10 April 2018- Professor Helge Janicke
Bio: Professor Helge Janicke is the Technical Director of De Montfort University’s Cyber Technology Institute. He is the Head of School of Computer Science and Informatics. Prof. Janicke was awarded his PhD in Computer Science in 2007 and worked on Cyber Security with organisations such as Airbus, QinetiQ, Ministry of Defence and General Dynamics UK amongst others. His interests are covering formal verification techniques and their application to Cyber Security, SCADA and Industrial Control System Security as well as aspects of Cyber Warfare. He established DMU’s Airbus Group Centre of Excellence in SCADA Cyber Security and Forensics Research in 2013. He is a general chair of the International Symposium on SCADA and Industrial Control Systems Cyber Security Research (ICS-CSR).
Talk abstract: This talk will review some of the challenges surrounding Industrial Control System Cyber Security as these are essential to the understanding of the risks to manufacturing organisations and indeed to the maintenance of many of our critical national infrastructures. After reviewing some of the threat actors and their capabilities to exploit security vulnerabilities in this niche domain of cyber security research, the talk will look at approaches to managing risks within organisations. I will then be highlighting some of the ongoing research in the Cyber Technology Institute to address aspects with a focus on the educational challenges, and the preparation for security breaches in this sector. The talk will conclude with an outlook to the rise of related topics such as the Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0 and more generally Cyber Physical Systems.
- 11am, 27 February 2018 – Dr Paolo Palmieri
Bio:Paolo Palmieri is a Lecturer in Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science, University College Cork (Ireland). He holds a PhD in cryptography from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research work focuses on cryptographic protocols for privacy and anonymity, and he has worked on privacy enhancing technologies, secure computation, location privacy, and the security of smart cities and the Internet of Things.
Talk abstract:Location-based services are now widespread, driven by the availability of accurate and inexpensive positioning technology. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of how sensitive and revealing location information can be, whether it is the position of an individual user of social media, area monitoring in critical infrastructure, or tracking of commercial routes. How can we preserve location privacy and prevent malicious tracking without disrupting location based services? In this talk, Paolo will present the current state of the art of location privacy research, and propose a data-structural approach to cryptographic protocols for securing location information.
- 11.30am, 19 January 2018 – Dr Ian Overton
Bio: Dr. Ian Overton joined QUB in August 2017, where he leads the Data Intensive Biomedicine group and heads the Medical Bioinformatics Research Cluster at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology. His group employ network biology, machine learning and bioinformatics approaches to study phenotypic plasticity in development, metastasis and drug response – towards new clinical tools. He graduated in biochemistry (Oxford) when the first draft human genome was published, and was inspired towards computational biology by the potential for a step change in medicine.
- 2.30pm, 28 September – Dr Kaitai Liang
Bio: Kaitai Liang received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong in 2014. He is a lecturer in secure systems at the Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey. Before joining the University of Surrey, he was a post-doc researcher and lecturer at Department of Computer Science, Aalto University (Finland) and School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology, Manchester Metropolitan University, respectively. His research interests are applied cryptography and in particular, cryptographic protocols, encryption/signature, RFID, big data security, privacy-enhancing technology, and security in cloud computing.
- 11am, 14 September – Professor Gareth Howells
Talk Title: Exploring practical issues relating to the determination of device identity based on their physical and operating characteristics
Bio: Prof. Gareth Howells is a Professor of Secure Electronic Systems at the University of Kent, UK and Founder and Director of Metrarc Ltd, a joint spin-out company of the Universities of Kent and Essex. He has been involved in research relating to security, biometrics and pattern classification techniques for over thirty years and has been instrumental in the development of novel security technology for deriving encryption keys from the operating characteristics of digital systems. He has been awarded, either individually or jointly, research funding totalling over £10m relating to the pattern classification and security fields, publishing over 190 papers in the technical literature. Recent work has been directed towards the development of practical secure device authentication systems which are currently in the process of being commercially exploited.
Talk abstract: The digital revolution has transformed the way we create, destroy, share, process and manage information. However, such technology has also increased the opportunities for fraud and other related crimes to be committed. Therefore, as the adoption of such technologies expands, it becomes vital to ensure the integrity and authenticity of electronic digital systems and to manage, control access to and verify their identity. This talk will investigate practical issues related to the determination of device identity based on their physical and operating characteristics. Such a technology presents significant challenges in generating a robust and flexible system with sufficient entropy to operate in a practical environment. The talk will explore the technical challenges associated with the technology and examines some of the considerations associated with its successful commercial exploitation