News

Cécile Pierrot wins Cercle K2 Cybersecurity Trophy 2017

Cécile Pierrot from the Cryptology research group at CWI won the first Cybersecurity Trophy granted by Cercle K2. This French think tank awards prizes in 22 topics every two years. It aims at stimulating interdisciplinarity and promoting young researchers. The Cybersecurity Trophy 2017 rewarded Pierrot’s PhD thesis, which she defended at UPMC in Paris on 25 November 2016. The jury praised her for both theoretical and practical impacts of her results.

ERC Advanced Grant for CWI cryptographer Ronald Cramer

CWI cryptographer Ronald Cramer has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro for his proposal 'Algebraic Methods for Stronger Crypto'. He leads the Cryptology Research group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and is a full professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. The European Research Council awards these most prestigious personal grants to outstanding, well-established scientists with novel ideas towards high-risk, groundbreaking research that impacts both science and society at large.

CWI and Google announce first collision for Industry Security Standard SHA-1

'Industry deprecation proved to be too slow' Today, Thursday 23 February 2017, researchers at the Dutch research institute CWI and Google jointly announce that they have broken the SHA-1 internet security standard in practice. This industry standard is used for digital signatures and file integrity verification, which secure credit card transactions, electronic documents, GIT open-source software repositories and software distribution.

Cryptology researcher Marc Stevens awarded with Google research prize

CWI researcher Marc Stevens of the Cryptology research group has been awarded the Google Security Privacy and Anti-abuse applied award.

New attacks on location-based quantum cryptography

For secure communication of classified information, researchers want to deploy the sender’s location, so a receiver can be sure that a message is, for instance, really coming from the White House. Classic location-based methods are shown to be unsafe but location-based quantum cryptography seemed to have a chance.

Three articles from the Netherlands published in ERCIM News 106 on Cybersecurity

In July 2016, ERCIM News 106 was published: ercim-news.ercim.eu/en106. This issue featured a special theme on Cybersecurity, in which three articles from the Netherlands were published and one from Belgium. Another article from the Netherlands, on the 100th birthday of former CWI (MC) director and informatics pioneer Aad van Wijngaarden, was published in the Research & Society section.

Veni grants for Léo Ducas and Johannes Köster

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni grants to Léo Ducas and Johannes Köster of CWI.

First book on quantum-secure multi-party computation

Ronald Cramer (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), Ivan Damgard and Jesper Nielsen (Aarhus University) recently published the first book ever on information-theoretically secure multiparty computation (MPC) – a subfield of cryptography that describes security systems that cannot even be broken by quantum computers or unlimited computing power.

Researchers urge: industry standard SHA-1 should be retracted sooner

An international team of cryptanalysts urges the industry today that SHA-1 internet security standard should be retracted sooner, since the cost of breaking it is significantly lower than previously thought.

Vision on Quantum-Safe Encryption in WIRED and Quanta magazine

Research results of CWI cryptologists Ronald Cramer and Léo Ducas on quantum-safe encryption were discussed in an article on WIRED on 19 September 2015.

Marc Stevens keynote at Security in Times of Surveillance event

Marc Stevens (CWI) was one of the keynote speakers at the Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information (Ei/PSI) event on Security in Times of Surveillance on Friday 8 May 2015.

10-year anniversary for RISC crypto meetings

On 18 and 19 September the 10-year anniversary of the RISC seminar series on cryptography was celebrated with a two-day RISC Seminar on Theory of Cryptography at the Trippenhuis, home of the Royal Netherlands Academy o

Five Veni grants for CWI researchers

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni grants to Jop Briët, Jiyin He, Wouter Koolen, Marc Stevens and Xiaodong Zhuge of CWI.

Future mobile payments safer with quantum cryptographic identification

Payment by mobile phone will be common in the near future. Security of the payment system will partly be based on secure identification, and it will be crucial that no secret-key material, like a PIN or a password, is leaked while interacting with the payment terminal. Niek Bouman of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam has investigated a new identification method based on quantum mechanics.

Security guru Schneier: SHA-1 should be replaced due to CWI’s cryptanalysis

Security guru Bruce Schneier says that SHA-1 should be replaced. On his blog he writes that Intel researcher Jesse Walker estimated that it only costs 2.7 million dollar to break the cryptographic algorithm SHA-1 by renting Amazon servers, using the cryptographic method designed by CWI researcher Marc Stevens.