Research

EGIZ, led by Arne Tauber, is a joint effort of the Office of the Austrian Chancellery and IAIK. EGIZ provides the scientific background to the highly successful e-Government development in Austria. In the EU-wide ranking of e-Government implementations, Austria has been ranked number 1 in the years 2006 and 2007.

The Java Security group focuses on secure, performance-optimized software implementations of cryptographic algorithms and protocols. The research area covers several aspects of data and communication security from basic cryptographic methods to high-level technologies like Public Key Infrastructures, TLS, Embedded & Mobile-Security, E-Mail- or XML-Security. The group is lead by Peter Lipp and actively participates in international standardisation activities like ETSI-ESI, OASIS-DSS or relevant IETF and W3C working groups.

The Secure & Correct Systems group, led by Prof. Roderick Bloem, focuses on the design, implementation, and verification of secure and correct systems. This includes Trusted Computing Formal Methods for Design and Verification.

The SCoS group researches ways to make PCs, embedded devices, and mobile phone more secure. We are using technologies such as TPMs or TrustZone to answer questions like "How do I know which software is run by a cloud provider" or "How do I protect the e-Banking app on my iPhone." Furthermore, we consider cryptographic methods for anonymous authentication.

The SCoS group is looking at methods to make systems correct by construction. In particular, we are researching methods to automatically generate correct code and to correct faulty programs.

The Secure Entities for Smart Environments group, led by Joern-Marc Schmidt, focuses on the design and secure implemetation of cryptographic primitives. In particular, we study four main topics: Implementation Attacks, Cryptography, Secure RFID, and VLSI Design.

Our group investigates all types of implementation attacks (side-channel analysis, fault analysis, probing attacks, etc.), which pose a serious threat to all types of crypto devices (smart cards, RFID tags, embedded systems, etc.). Based on the experiences gained in the attacks, we develop efficient countermeasures for hardware and software implementations of crypto devices.

IAIK's Krypto Group is supervised by the cryptologist Vincent Rijmen. Vincent Rijmen is the co-designer of the algorithm Rijndael, which in October 2000 was selected by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to become the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Our main motivation is to provide state-of-the-art and standardized crypto solutions for passive RFID technology. To achieve this, it is necessary to design dedicated HW crypto modules that fulfil ultra low power requirements. Based on our suggested HW modules, we provide suggestions for secure protocol extensions and application prototypes using secure RFID technology. The vision of our research is to enable a Secure Internet of Things based on passive RFID devices with real crypto capability.

We focus on secure application specific hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms. The requirements for our developments are deduced from real word applications to find the best fitting optimization goals. Investigations on design methodologies and specific implementation issues (area efficiency, low-power, low energy, high-throughput, SCA protection) of symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms like AES, ECC, SHA, DES or RSA are performed.