Once more, our annual summer school Security Week took place earlier in September in the beautiful halls of our Old Campus.
Increasingly popular, it drew more than 90 participants from close and afar. Twelve international speakers shared their expertise, and students had the opportunity to present their theses, take part in labs, and gain ECTS points.
Our outing to a traditional inn in the countryside, and the odd night out were another good opportunity for networking and not to be missed. You can have a look at a few impressions here.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Graz next year!

Main processors (CPUs) of computers are designed to run multiple applications simultaneously. This is beneficial for efficiency, but poses a security risk. Researchers at TU Graz and the Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found a novel method that allows attackers to read data from the memory of CPUs by analyzing the processor’s energy consumption. They call this method of attack “Collide+Power“.

To find out more, click on the link on the right or see Collide+Power

The US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has selected Ascon as new standard for lightweight cryptography.

This concludes the NIST Lightweight Crypto (LWC) project, a 4-year competition with the goal of standardizing a lightweight authenticated encryption algorithm suitable for constrained environments.

Ascon was developed in 2014 at IAIK, TU Graz by Christoph Dobraunig (now at Intel), Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel, and Martin Schläffer (both now at Infineon).
The team has since continuously worked on the Ascon family to propose new family members, develop efficient and secure implementations, provide new security proofs and security analysis, and more.
This effort was also supported by several IAIK colleagues over the years, particularly Hannes Groß and Robert Primas, who provided an extensive range of efficient implementations. The Ascon team thanks everybody who has contributed to this success.

The NIST LWC competition started in 2019 with 56 Round-1 candidates, which were narrowed down in multiple rounds to 10 finalists and finally a single winner. We are proud that the finalists included all 3 submissions co-designed by IAIK cryptographers:

• Ascon, previously selected as primary choice for lightweight cryptography in the CAESAR competition for authenticated encryption, designed by Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel, and Martin Schläffer
• ISAP, a design with inherent robustness against certain implementation attacks, designed by Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Stefan Mangard, Florian Mendel, Bart Mennink, Robert Primas, and Thomas Unterluggauer
• Elephant, a parallel design by Tim Beyne, Yu Long Chen, Christoph Dobraunig, and Bart Mennink.

 

Media links: NIST announcement · TU Graz · APA · ORF.at · Der Standard · Kleine Zeitung · Hacker News

Each year, the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research presents an award for outstanding dissertations of Austrian universities. The top 40 graduates of doctoral studies of an academic year are honoured with the “Award of Excellence“.
This year, we are happy to congratulate IAIK alumni Daniel Kales, who was one of three TU Graz awardees. He received the prize for his dissertation “Improving Modern Cryptographic Protocols using Domain-Specific Symmetric Primitives”.

We are pleased to announce that Bettina Könighofer has been promoted to be an assistant professor for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence at IAIK. Bettina founded the group Trusted AI. In her research, she and her group is using state-of-the-art formal methods to test, to verify, and to monitor AI systems with the goal to make sure that AI systems are safe, secure, transparent, accountable, robust, and unbiased. Bettina’s research was the first that provided provable correctness guarantees for deep learning systems.

Bettina is lecturing the bachelor course Logic and Computability and partially teaches the graduate course Model Checking.