CASED is funded by
NEWSLETTER 2/2011
CASED introduces ...
Prof. Dr. Stefan Katzenbeisser
Prof. Dr. Stefan Katzenbeisser came to the TU Darmstadt as a Junior Professor in 2008 and was involved in the establishment of the research center CASED. Prior to this he held a position as Senior Scientist at Philips Research. Since 2011 he has held the "Security Engineering" professorship funded by the Horst Görtz-Foundation.
Katzenbeisser is the author of more than 80 publications and 13 patent applications. He is currently the associate editor of the bi-monthly journal “IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing” and also a member of the IEEE’s Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security.
He received his doctorate, which dealt with the subject of "Cryptographic Watermarking", from the Vienna University of Technology in 2004 and qualified as a professor at the Technische Universität München (Technical University in Munich) in 2009.
Katzenbeisser heads the "Security Engineering Group", which focuses on the development of theoretically substantiated procedures for the design and analysis of security-critical systems. One key area of this research work relates to the development of technical procedures for protecting highly sensitive data against unauthorized access (Privacy Enhancing Technologies).
Short CV:
- 1996-2001: Degree course in computer science at the Vienna University of Technology
- 2003-2005: Scientific assistant at the TU München
- 2004: Completion of his doctorate in technical science at the Vienna University of Technology
- 2006-2008: Senior Scientist at Philips Research, Eindhoven (Netherlands)
- 2008-2011: Junior Professor at the TU Darmstadt, funded by the Horst Görtz-Foundation
- 2009: Qualification as a Professor at the TU München
- Since 2011: Horst Görtz-Professorship at the TU Darmstadt
Focus topic: Security and eHealth
Technical data protection for highly sensitive data
We are often confronted with a dilemma when dealing with applications that include demanding requirements vis-à-vis security and privacy:
- the processing of sensitive medical data (e.g. the human genome or medical files) enables new kinds of treatment to be offered (eHealth or treatment methods such as remote diagnostics), it does, however, also place significant demands on data protection.
- The storage of biometrical data, such as fingerprints, facial features or DNS, allows people to be identified reliably, but aspects such as identity theft or the infringement of data protection rules become easier as a result of this.
- Cloud Computing enables the performance of complex and time-consuming calculations to be outsourced to foreign computers, however, it also increases the risk of data being viewed or manipulated by unauthorized persons.
In the past, data protection was primarily ensured using access controls and audits, but these procedures quickly reached their limits when faced with distributed applications. New technical protection measures can provide assistance here: these enable data to be made available for a wide range of different applications, while ensuring protection against unauthorized access. The "Security Engineering Group" deals with two fundamental approaches in order to protect highly sensitive data in distributed applications.
Information Rights Management (IRM), for example, allows the implementation of fine-grained access controls across multiple systems, which, in turn, enable the "principle of necessity" to be realized. In order to ensure an efficient implementation of IRM, special cryptographic procedures based on "Distributed Attribute-Based Encryption" were developed, which enable access restrictions to be specified during the encryption of data, which must be adhered to during decryption.
Furthermore, special cryptographic protocols can be used that are capable of processing encrypted data and, thanks to their design, ensure only correctly defined requests from authorized persons are permissible.
Within the scope of a project supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which was concluded successfully in spring 2011, the "Security Engineering Group" developed cryptographic procedures, which, for example, can be used to process genetic data without the provider of the process being aware of the actual content. From a technical perspective, homomorphous encryption methods are used for this purpose, which can perform calculations on the encrypted data.
The Security Engineering Group deals primarily with the development of efficient algorithms for analyzing probabilistic models (such as Hidden Markov Models) using encrypted data.
Brief explanations: what is the ...
Horst Görtz Foundation
The Horst Görtz-Foundation, which was named after its founder CASED Advisory Board member Horst Görtz, was originally set up by the company Utimaco Safeware AG in 1996. One of its objectives is the promotion of science and technology in research and education on a non-profit basis, above all in relation to information security. The foundation awards the German IT Security prize every two years, which includes a total of 200,000 euros in prize money.
AT CASED the foundation generously funds the professorship of Principal Investigator Stefan Katzenbeisser and six scholarships supervised by CASED upcoming PostDocs.
Upcoming Events
- Conference on Future Internet by the BMBF, July 5 - 6, 2011, Berliner Congress Center, Berlin
- Health, Wealth and Identity Theft: designing and evaluating usable privacy and security mechanisms for online happiness, July 5, 2011, British HCI 2011, Newcastle UK
- REVOTE'11 - 2nd Int. Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Electronic Voting Systems, August 29, 2011, Trento, Italy
- 1st Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust, September 6 - 8, 2011, Mailand, Italien
- Dagstuhl Seminar: Public-Key Cryptography, September 25 - 30, 2011, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
- VoteID 2011, September 29 - 30, 2011, Tallinn, Estland
- ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management (ACM DRM 2011), October 21, 2011, Chicago, USA
Workshops hosted by CAST e.V.
- Mobile Security / Embedded Security, August 18 - 19, 2011,
- perspeGKtive 2011 - "Innovative und sichere Informationstechnologie für das Gesundheitswesen von morgen", September 7, 2011,
- Biometrie - BIOSIG2011, September 8 - 9, 2011,
Contact:
CASED
Mornewegstraße 32
64293 Darmstadt
Geschäftsstelle
Tel.: +49 6151 16-4895
E-Mail: sek
cased.de
Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
Anne Grauenhorst
Tel.: +49 6151 16-6185
E-Mail: anne.grauenhorstcased.de
Weitere Informationen:
www.cased.de