BCRYPT

With the rise of the Internet as a global information infrastructure and the increasing adoption of connected devices, information that used to take a considerable effort to retrieve is now readily available This information infrastructure will keep expanding and will become more pervasive: we will evolve from a few devices per user to thousands of devices, large and small (up to the nano-scale) that are integrated into the environment and into our bodies and that interact in many complex ways.  In addition our dependence on this infrastructure will grow, hence it becomes increasingly important to understand and manage the risks coming with this new infrastructure.  This includes unauthorized access to services and information, privacy violations, denial of service attacks, and various kind of malware.  With legal protection proving too slow and cumbersome to act as an effective deterrent in the fast-moving world of information technology, prevention of attacks by technological means has become more important than ever. 

This project intends to perform fundamental research into a number of selected disciplines that intend to address the information security challenges we are facing. Cryptology is the science that studies techniques from discrete mathematics in order to provide secrecy, authenticity and related properties for digital information; cryptology is a fundamental enabler for information security, privacy and dependability. Watermarking allows embedding hidden information into the digital media, such that the watermark is imperceptible, robust and difficult to remove. Perceptual hashes are based on a combination of watermarking and cryptographic techniques; they can be used as perceptually relevant signatures, as tool for content dependent key generation, for persistent identification and for content retrieval.  Cryptology and watermarking techniques can be found at the core of computer and network security, of digital identification and digital signatures, digital rights management systems, content retrieval, tamper detection, etc.  In the last decade, the insight has grown that developing secure software and hardware implementations is much more challenging than originally anticipated: the discipline of information security engineering has as goal to bridge the gap between the world of mathematics and modelling and that of building secure systems.