Kolloquium Wi2017-18

Speaker

Dr. Anja Lehmann

IBM Research - Zürich, Switzerland

When: Mo, 11.12.2017

Where: Room D-125

Topic

Cryptography for the Real World: From Theory to Practice and Vice Versa

Language: English

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