Cryptography on Non-Trusted Machines

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Stefan Dziembowski

DATE: Thursday, October 15th, 2009
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-013, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 09.30

ABSTRACT:
Most of the real-life attacks on cryptographic devices do not break their mathematical foundations, but exploit vulnerabilities in their implementations. This concerns both the cryptographic software executed on PCs (that can be attacked by viruses), and the implementations on hardware (that can be subject to the side-channel attacks). Traditionally fixing this problem was left to the practitioners, since it was a common belief that theory cannot be of any help here. However, new exciting results in cryptography suggest that this view was too pessimistic: there exist methods to design cryptographic protocols in such a way that they are secure even if the hardware on which they are executed cannot be fully trusted.  In my talk I'll give a short survey of some of these new results.

BIO:
Stefan Dziembowski  is an assistant professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He is interested in theoretical and applied cryptography.
Dziembowski received his MSc degree in computer science in 1996 from the Warsaw University, and his PhD degree in computer science in 2001 from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Then, he spent 18 months as a post-doctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. Afterwards, for 3 years he was an assistant professor at the Warsaw University. Later he spent 9 months as a post-doc at CNR Pisa, and 18 months as a post-doc at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
His papers appeared at leading scientific conferences (FOCS, STOC, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, TCC, LICS), and journals (Journal of Cryptology and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory).  He also served as a PC member of several international conferences, including EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, Theoretical Cryptography Conference (TCC), and the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP).
He is a winner of the ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant competition (in 2008) and a recipient of the Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellowship (2006-2007).  He was also awarded the scholarship for young researchers from Foundation for Polish Science (2003-2004).

HOST: Prof. Mauro Pezzè