Challenges in Cyber Security (CiCS)
Data breaches and cyberattacks happen continuously. Only exceptionally big ones make the news. Industry and government scramble to transition security into practice. This is a slow process, since adding security requires high demands on power, bandwidth, or latency, increasing costs beyond what users can tolerate. At the same time, attacks get more powerful. Sophisticated exploitation of hardware features has opened up remote attack strategies that earlier were limited to attackers having physical access to the hardware. More and more systems, ranging from personal medical devices to critical infrastructure, are connected to the Internet, creating even more avenues of attack. Defence efforts built upon oversimplified models of reality have been shown to fail again and again. Bugs are pervasive in software, whether new software or legacy software. This becomes security-critical when the bugs appear in implementations of cryptography or other components of the trusted computing base. Academic tools to prove software secure continue to be rejected by typical software engineers as far too labour-intensive. Conquering these obstacles requires coordinated, fundamental, scientific research in cybersecurity.
The CiCS Gravitation project tackles various core research challenges centred on three pillars: cryptography, software security, and hardware security. The goal of the semester programme is to lecture state-of-the-art solutions and techniques to the broader security research community, and engage in discussion. Research-focused workshops aim at bringing state-of-the-art research in each of the pillars to the Netherlands, and seek and identify potentially impactful collaborative research projects together with our international colleagues.
The program will consist of:
In 2028:
- One-week CiCS PhD School for graduate students (PhD and final-year Master’s students).
- Three three-day workshops
2029:
- Lorentz Workshop
More information will follow.
