Today is Friday 25th July 2008.  For the past events click on the arrow

Tue, 29-Jul-08 COSIC seminar - Implementation of an anonymous credential protocol - Victor Sucasas, Universidade de Vigo 2:30 pm-3:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 The relevancy that the information security is obtaining in this age, due to the vast amount of services emerged from the demand of such a competitive digital world, have led to a situation where security and privacy are in discord. Nowadays, digital systems face a tradeoff between keeping the security of the system and the privacy rights of their customers. Furthermore, the tendency to store and manage big amounts of personal information, most of the times without the knowledge of the customers, can make users suspect about the misuse of their personal data, and remove their confidence in service providers. In this scenario, new technologies like anonymous credential systems are rising in demand. These technologies make use of zero-knowledge proofs and commitment schemes to allow the authentication of the users' attributes and privileges towards service providers, while preserving the user's privacy and anonymity. At the same time such system provide features that prevent misuses by rogue users that try to take advantage of their anonymity. The goal of this project is the study and implementation of an anonymous credential system. Taking as starting point the existing previous work in this field, we make our own implementation and propose further improvements to build a complete credential system. We explain in detail the main issues that concerns such systems and possible solutions for their implementations. Tue, 29-Jul-08 COSIC seminar - Smart card implementation of anonymous credentials - Josep Balasch, Escola Tècnica Superior d 3:00 pm-3:30 pm, ESAT 00.62 In an anonymous credential system, users are given cryptographic tokens that allow them to authenticate and prove certified attributes while preserving anonymity. In a typical scenario, a user requests a credential from an issuer organization and later proves some information about himself to a verifier. One of the main concerns of such anonymous systems is related to the misuse of credentials, which includes the sharing of credentials between users, as well as the secure storage of cryptographic keys. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is based on binding a credential to a tamper-resistant device that stores the secret key of the user. Sharing of credentials in this scenario would require the extraction of the secret key, hence the tamper-resistant property of the device. However, both the small size and computational power of these devices make them inadequate to run expensive cryptographic protocols. Recently, the Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) scheme has been adapted as the method for remote authentication of the Trusted Platform Module (TMP) device. The system model considered contains an issuer authority, a verification authority and a host connected to an embedded TPM. To minimize the amount of operations carried out on the TPM, some of these operations are outsourced to the host. The operations carried out by the TPM are only those that require the knowledge of the secret key, plus some additional computations to ensure that the secret is hidden from the host. Even though this approach lessens the computation effort of the TPM, the amount of remaining operations is still important. In this thesis, we present the implementation of a simplified version of the DAA Signing protocol, that runs on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller. To test the usability of our approach, a set of target-adapted arithmetic routines are provided and implemented following a bottom-up design. Several techniques proposed in the literature are tested and compared in terms of computational speed and memory usage. Fri, 1-Aug-08 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Avinesh Sonawane 10:00 am, KULeuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 20, room 00.42. Avinesh Sonawane, Cell Biology, EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany will talk about: "How Pseudomonas aeruginosa evades an innate immune response in cystic fibrosis disease". Fri, 8-Aug-08 COSIC seminar - Collisions and other Non-Random Properties for Step-Reduced SHA-256 - Sebastiaan Indesteege, K.U.Leuven 3:00 pm-4:00 pm, ESAT TBA We study the security of step-reduced but otherwise unmodified SHA-256. We show the first collision attacks on SHA-256 reduced to 23 and 24 steps with complexities $2^{18}$ and $2^{28.5}$, respectively. We give example colliding message pairs for 23-step and 24-step SHA-256. The best previous, recently obtained result was a collision attack for up to 22 steps. We extend our attacks to 23 and 24-step reduced SHA-512 with respective complexities of $2^{44.9}$ and $2^{53.0}$. Additionally, we show non-random behaviour of the SHA-256 compression function in the form of free-start near-collisions for up to 31 steps, which is 6 more steps than the recently obtained non-random behaviour in the form of a semi-free-start near-collision.  Even though this represents a step forwards in terms of cryptanalytic techniques, the results do not threaten the security of applications using SHA-256. This is joint work with Florian Mendel, Bart Preneel, and Christian Rechberger. Thu, 4-Sep-08 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - An Crepel - Valerie Storms 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 An Crepel Positional cloning in autism and congenital brain malformations Valerie Storms Detection of regulatory motifs and modules in eukaryotic sequences based on co-expression and orthology information. (12.00 - 13.00 lunch) Mon, 8-Sep-08 Graduate school van DYSCO Fall 2008 "CONTROL AND NONLINEARITY" Lecturer : Jean-Michel CORON (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, France)   "INTRODUCTION TO DERIVATIVE-FREE OPTIMIZATION " Lecturer : Luis N. VICENTE (University of Coimbra, Portugal)   Spring 2009 "SUBSPACE BASED IDENTIFICATION IN FREQUENCY DOMAIN AND MODELLING WITH ORTHONORMAL BASES FUNCTIONS " Lecturer : Huseyin ACKAY (Anadolu University, Turkey) "LINEAR AND NONLINEAR OBSERVERS WITH APPLICATIONS TO FAULT DETECTION AND ISOLATION" Lecturers : Michel KINNAERT (ULB, Belgium) and Gildas BESANCON (INP Grenoble, France) http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/graduate/ Thu, 18-Sep-08 K.U. Leuven Postdoc Day 10:30 am-5:30 pm, Gasthuisberg O&N2, Leuven Over the last decade, K.U.Leuven has considerably increased the ranks of its junior researchers while maintaining a stable number of professors. This increase in research personnel has enormously strengthened its research productivity. However, at the same time, professors and group leaders are forced to rely more on senior staff – postdocs – for the daily management and guidance of juniors to ensure their research keeps on track and remains highly efficient. At the same time, the postdocs themselves are trying to launch their own successful research careers, although long-term perspectives usually are absent. Therefore, the postdocs’ expectations of the university staff, as well as their diverse daily tasks, are increasingly demanding. The university is aware of this and attaches great importance to its postdoc staff. Several new initiatives have been launched to inform postdocs of funding opportunities and career perspectives at K.U.Leuven and abroad, including novel K.U.Leuven funding categories dedicated to postdocs. [PDF] Wed, 15-Oct-08 Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering - Aharon Ben-Tal 5:00 pm-6:00 pm, Auditorium of the Arenberg Castle 8th Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering "Robust Conic Optimization-Theory and Applications" Aharon Ben-Tal (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology) Thu, 16-Oct-08 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Inge Thijs - Kim Hermans 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 Inge Thijs Controls matter in genome-wide location analysis Kim Hermans Differential fluorescence induction as a genome-wide, single cell based technology to study salmonella biofilm formation (12.00 - 13.00 lunch) Thu, 13-Nov-08 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Vanoirbeek E - Sigrid C.J. De Keersmaecker 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 Vanoirbeek E Microarray analysis of MCF-7 breast cancer cells treated with 1,25-(OH)2D3 or the analog WY1112 Sigrid C.J. De Keersmaecker towards systems biology, the Salmonella Typhimurium luxs/ai-2 related pathway as a case study (12.00 - 13.00 lunch) Thu, 18-Dec-08 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Gwendoline Kint - Leo Tranchevent 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 Gwendoline Kint Differential proteome analysis of Salmonella Typhimurium SL1344 using 2D-DIGE technology Leo Tranchevent miRanking or "Prioritization of miRNA targets" (12.00 - 13.00 lunch) Tue, 13-Jan-09 Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering - Martin P. Bendsoe 5:00 pm-6:00 pm, Auditorium of the Arenberg Castle 9th Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering "Topology Optimization of Multiphysics Systems - Successes and Challenges" Martin P. Bendsøe, (Technical University of Denmark) E-Mail: M.P.Bendsoe@mat.dtu.dk,   Web:  www.mat.dtu.dk Thu, 15-Jan-09 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Robert Vandenberg - Hong Sun 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 Robert Vandenberg Title to be announced Hong Sun The regulatory network of vitamin D3: in silico analysis (12.00 - 13.00 lunch) Thu, 12-Feb-09 K.U. Leuven Seminars on Bioinformatics - Katrijn Van Deun - Olivier Gevaert 10:30 am-12:00 pm, ESAT 00.62 Katrijn Van Deun Issues in developing a useful latent class unfolding model for gene expression data Olivier Gevaert Bayesian integration of omics data to model cancer outcomes (12.00 - 13.00 lunch)