This is an invitation to the next Informatics Colloquium on Monday, 11 December 2017, 17:15, Campus "Informatikum/Stellingen", Room D-125. The talk entitled "Cryptography for the Real Word: From Theory to Practice and Vice Versa" will be held by Dr. Anja Lehmann, IBM Research, Zurich.
This talk will be held in English. The colloquium committee is looking forward to seeing you all there and to sharing this talk with you. For details on the series of colloquiums planned, please visit https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/home/kolloquium/wise17-18.html
On behalf of the colloquium committee
Stephanie Schulte Hemming
Universität Hamburg
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will present new research results for enhancing the security and privacy of real-world cryptographic schemes. The talk will revolve around two main examples: password-based authentication and pseudonymization as a technique to de-sensitize data. For both, I will discuss the inherent security limitations of the currently deployed solutions, and describe new approaches that provide significantly stronger security guarantees. In the case of passwords, the main weakness is their vulnerability to offline attacks that determine a user's password by brute-forcing all possibilities. I will show how the risk of such attacks can be mitigated without forcing users to choose complex and hard to memorize passwords. I will also discuss the challenges that arise when trying to bring new technologies from theory into practice, and sketch some research work that in turn got inspired by deployment challenges.
BIO:
Anja Lehmann is a researcher in the Security & Privacy group at IBM Research - Zurich, where she works in the area of cryptography, information security and privacy. After her PhD in computer science from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany, she joined IBM as a PostDoc in 2010 and became a permanent research staff member in 2012. Her work spans from basic research, developing new cryptographic protocols with provable security guarantees, to the real-world deployment of new crypto and privacy techniques. Anja was also working on the first pilots of privacy-enhancing credentials, such as IBM's Identity Mixer, in a number of European FP7 and H2020 projects. In January 2018, she is organizing the Real-World Crypto Symposium in Zurich.
CONTACT:
Prof. Dr. Hannes Federrath, Universität Hamburg, FB Informatik