Asiacrypt 2019

Asiacrypt 2019 was organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in cooperation with the technical group on Information Security(ISEC) of Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers(IEICE).

COINS supported Shuang Wu to attend the Asiacrypt 2019 in Kobe, Japan.

Norsk Kryptoseminar (The Norwegian Crypto Seminar) is an event that was started in 1998. The purpose was to bring together the cryptology environments in Norway to promote theory and practice in cryptology. The seminar was open to anyone who works with cryptology in Norway.

COINS supported seven students to attend the Norsk Kryptroseminar 2020 in Kjeller: Thor Tunge, Bor de Kock, Mattia Veroni, Morten Solberg, Lise Millerjord, Magnus Ringerud, Tjerand Aga Silde and Morten Øygarden. Here is their combined report from the event. A separete report of Morten Øygarden you can find here.

The aim of the NISK conference series was to be the principal Norwegian research venue for presenting and discussing developments in the field of ICT security and privacy, and bringing together people from universities, industry, and public authorities.

Both national and international contributions by researchers, practitioners, and PhD- and Master thesis students presenting new problems and solutions within topics on ICT security were invited.

NISK 2019 conference was co-located with COINS Ph.D. student seminar. COINS supported several students to attend the NISK 2019 in Narvik, Norway.

Here are their reports:

• Berglind Fjola Smaradottir
• Aida Akbarzadeh
• Mazaher Kianpour

Decentralized has established itself as Europe’s premier conference on blockchain and digital currencies. Decentralized 2019 is one of the most popular events in Europe.

It hosted a total of 1500+ attendees, 40+ sponsors, 100+ speakers, 20+ exhibitors, 30+ media partners and attendees from 50+ countries. It was truly a global event with a focus on blockchain and decentralized ledger technology.

The Decentralized 2019 event brought the best academic experts and business executives from all around the world. They debated on future developments and current trends which were spread across three conference tracks.

• Business: Business leaders and executives discussed how digital currencies and blockchain have the potential to disrupt businesses.
• Technology: The professionals from digital currency and blockchain took on the latest development
• Academia: The researchers discussed how the blockchain space looks exciting and share their research.

COINS supported Abylay Satybaldy to attend the Decentralized 2019 in Athens, Greece.

The 3rd biannual IEEE Nordic Student and Young Professionals Congress 2019 was co-hosted by the IEEE Sweden Young Professionals affinity group and the IEEE Finland Young Professionals affinity group, with support from the respective student branches and women in engineering affinity groups.

The theme of this year’s event was sustainability, and all the lectures and workshops followed that theme. 5G solutions, smart cities, electric and smart vehicles, and smart energy storage are just some of the topics that were discussed during this year’s IEEE Nordic SYP.

The event began on Friday the 25th of October. Participants have taken from Arlanda airport to the cruise ship to set sail for Finland. Boarding began at 16:30. The attendees were then able to attend IEEE workshops and presentations on Friday evening before dinner, and a night’s entertainment.

After breakfast, the cruise arrived in Helsinki on Saturday morning at approximately 10:00 am. The day in Helsinki was based around the industry with talks from leading Nordic tech companies like Nokia.

Attendees then boarded the cruise ship again, for another evening of IEEE talks and workshops, followed by Gala dinner. After breakfast Sunday morning, the cruise arrived in Stockholm where there was a similar day of industry talks and workshops. The event was brought to a close Sunday evening and attendees were treated to a night of sightseeing and entertainment in Stockholm.

After breakfast on Monday morning, attendees were given help to get back to Arlanda to get their flights home.

COINS supported three students: Ashish Rauniyar, Debesh Jha and Desta Haileselassie Hagos to attend the IEEE Nordic Student and Young Professionals Congress 2019 in Helsinki, Finland / Stockholm, Sweden.

The Training School featured a program of lectures delivered by leading experts in the area of 5G networks, from both academia and industry. The objective of the School was to give attendees a global view, with an insight into some specific aspects, on research in key features of the emerging 5G technologies from the networking perspective, addressing models, architectures and applications. Attendees had an opportunity to participate in stimulating discussions with lecturers, obtain useful feedback, and initiate new collaborations. Lectures provided the background on 5G wireless communications networks concepts, ranging from the more fundamental ones related to concepts and mathematical modelling to experimental and applied ones connected to the incoming standardisation features.

The School aimed at Ph.D. students who actively work on or are interested in future mobile networks.

COINS supported  Desta Haileselassie Hagos to attend the 8th Training School on Network Models, Architectures and Applications for 5G in Moscow, Russia.

COINS supported Elahe Fazeldehkordi to attend the GDPR course in Brussels, Belgium.

This OSM Hackfest offered a great opportunity to share and learn with OSM developers and module leaders, and explore opportunities for synergies and collaboration.

It allowed new users to get familiar with OSM Release SIX and exercise all the main functionalities, from basic operations (installation, setup, common operations, etc.) to most advanced capabilities, such as 5G network slicing with a big focus on VNF on-boarding activities covering Day 0/1/2 operations.

In addition, experienced users and developers had the opportunity to hack into OSM, build complex examples, fine-tune, test and demonstrate Release SEVEN and experimental features on the OSM Remote Labs network.OSM Hackfest participants learnt to:

• Install OSM and run some examples
• Get familiar with OSM’s GUI and CLI
• Create own VNF and NS descriptors and build packages
• Model and deploy NS/VNF with EPA capabilities
• Model dynamic Life Cycle Management operations with Day-1 and Day-2 actions
• Model 5G Network Slices and complex NS with PNFs
• Perform basic troubleshooting
• Configure Fault and Performance management and close-loop operations
• Modify and experiment with OSM source code
• Build complex examples and run own experimental testing

COINS supported Ali Esmaeily to attend the 7th OSM Hackfest in Patras, Greece.

CLEF 2019 was hosted by the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland, 09-12 September 2019.

CLEF 2019 was the 10th CLEF conference continuing the popular CLEF campaigns which have run since 2000 contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks.
CLEF 2019 consisted of an independent peer-reviewed conference on a broad range of issues in the fields of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation, and a set of labs and workshops designed to test different aspects of mono and cross-language Information retrieval systems. Together, the conference and the lab series maintained and expanded upon the CLEF tradition of community-based evaluation and discussion on evaluation issues.

This year, CLEF was open to a wider, industrial community. The Industry Days allowed the interaction between the scientific community, practitioners and decision-makers through panels, a special keynote and presentations. Additionally, the very best and most pertinent work of the academic CLEF participants was made accessible in a concise manner.

COINS supported Parisa Rezaee Borj to attend the PAN at CLEF 2019 in Lugano, Switzerland.

The summer school was organized in lectures and hackathons, providing a mix of in-depth research presentations and hands-on experience, and it was focused on published and current high-impact research projects. The school covered cutting-edge topics on blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies to foster understanding of their respective security and privacy specific requirements and guarantees by bringing together academic researchers and experts from industry. Example topics included: novel attacks on distributed systems; consensus protocols and fault tolerance; incentive structures, such as proof-of-work and proof-of-stake; recent results on blockchain scalability, payment channels and state channels; advancements on smart contracts; or, realistic adversarial capabilities.

Students had networking opportunities with experts from academia and industry, sponsors, and among each other. They also had the opportunity to present their own results in front of experts from academia and industry in the form of lightning talks and poster presentations.

COINS supported Shuang Wu to attend the 1st International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies in Vienna, Austria.

The interdisciplinary summer school on privacy provided an intensive one-week academic post-graduate programme teaching privacy from a technical, legal and social perspective. The goal of the summer school was to provide students with a solid background in the theory of privacy construction, modeling and protection from these three different perspectives. It also aimed to help them to establish a first international network with peers and senior academics across these disparate disciplines.

According to Gray et al. dark patterns started as a practitioner led initiative uncovering features of interface design crafted to trick users into doing things they may not want to do, but which benefit the business in question. More formally, the authors define it as instances in which designers use their knowledge of human behavior (e.g., psychology), and the desires of end users to implement deceptive functionality that is not in the user’s best interest.
At this summer school, they focused on dark patterns that impact users’ privacy or their ability to practice their data protection rights. Dark patterns raise crucial questions regarding compliance with European data protection legislation and ethical technology deployment. In January 2019 the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) imposed a fine of 50 million Euros on Google “in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization”, according to the CNIL. This sky-high fine illustrates the importance paid by regulators to combating dark patterns. Also, consumer organizations, like the Norwegian Consumer Council, have reported on how users are ‘deceived by design’ by tech companies, discouraging people to exercise their rights to privacy. In this summer school, they proposed to look beyond the interface, and ask, where do dark patterns emerge in the production of internet-based services, in the organizing of software and hardware infrastructures, in the elaboration and interpretation of laws, in the push for certain economic models, and conceptions of data, systems, users, and the social. How do we come to recognize, uncover, resist and prevent dark patterns in these different socio-technical contexts?

Dark patterns as a concept is not easy to pin down since manipulation of environment and behavior can be seen as a part of any design intervention. Yet, the rise of the concept is indicative that there is a considerable set of practices that are identified under the label of dark patterns. In this context, at the summer school, they discussed study dark matters and asked whether intentions matter, or outcomes can also serve as a way to identify whether a practice may qualify as a dark pattern in the context of privacy and data protection. Being able to think collectively about this hard question provided people with tools, methods and arguments to address the continuum between poor design or decisions, lack of resources, incompetence, recklessness, optimization, externalization of costs, and intentional patterns that lead to manipulation, deception or unwarranted levels of persuasion. They explored together where we can productively draw the line when it comes to patterns that harm vs. patterns that just do, and how technical, social, ethical, legal and economic practices may be reimagined to address these practices.

The summer school was interdisciplinary, involving the following disciplines: computer science, law and social sciences / media and communication studies.
The school lasted one week, with nine scheduled lectures (five-morning lectures and four-afternoon lectures) of two hours each. These nine lectures were equally distributed over the three disciplines, with top-notch lectures from each of the disciplines. The lectures laid the grounds for an interdisciplinary conversation among students and lecturers coming from a variety of backgrounds.

The remaining time was used for hands on working group sessions to study practical cases. The cases were offered by businesses, governments, government related institutions (like DPAs) and civil society/NGOs. Groups of six students, were formed to tackle the cases and reported back on their results in a plenary session.

The school was held in a location that encourages dialogue and social interactions between both the staff and the students, both during lectures and in the evening. Staff (i.e. lecturers) were encouraged to stay at the summer school for the whole length of the school. The summer school was foremost aimed at PhD students from computer science, law and social sciences.

Participants of the summer school were awarded two ECTS (study credits) and received a certificate of attendance issued by the Radboud University attesting this.

COINS supported Elahe Fazeldehkordi to attend the ISP 2019 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

5th World Congress on New Technologies (NewTech’19)

NewTech was aimed to become one of the leading international annual congresses in the fields of new technologies. The congress was composed of 4 conferences. While each conference consisted of an individual and separate theme, the conferences shared considerable overlap, which prompted the organization of this congress.

ICNFA’19 – 10th International Conference on Nanotechnology: Fundamentals and Applications
ICEPR’19 – 9th International Conference on Environmental Pollution and Remediation
ICBB’19 – 5th International Conference on Biotechnology and Bioengineering
ICERT’19 – 3nd International Conference on Energy Research and Technology

This congress provided excellent opportunities to the scientists, researchers, industrial engineers, and university students to present their research achievements and to develop new collaborations and partnerships with experts in the field.

COINS supported Elahe Fazeldehkordi to attend the NewTech’19 in Lisbon, Portugal.

While blockchain-based applications such as Bitcoin are still in their infancy, a dramatic increase in industrial and academic interest in blockchain technology is evident. In addition, start-ups, as well as industry initiatives, are presently working intensely on blockchain-based innovations, making the technology one of the most promising drivers of innovation in many sectors and industries. However, the design and implementation of blockchain-based systems requires know-how in several areas, as well as mindful consideration of larger economic and societal issues. These objectives provided the starting point for this summer school.

In this fourth blockchain summer school organized by the European Blockchain Center, they focused on educating students in blockchain technology to develop solutions within different industries. The participants learned how blockchain technology is disrupting existing business models and gained insights in paradigmatic changes occurring from economic, organisational and computer science viewpoints. As learning outcomes, the participants were submerged into computer science, information systems, and business knowledge background in order to analyse existing business processes and their potential to convert them into blockchain-based solutions. In so doing, they were able to co-create new blockchain-based systems, taking into consideration both cryptographic and economic aspects.

Within the summer school, participants learned how to set up a development environment and how to work with proven platforms such as Ethereum, NEO and others. They were able to design and implement their own smart contracts and coded their own Dapps (decentralized apps).

Once basic blockchain elements have been introduced, participants worked on their own blockchain development projects, supported by the participating industry partners. The outcomes were functioning demonstrators, as well as a written documentation and reports that illustrated the business process or mechanism realized in a blockchain implementation and how, in so doing, a real-world challenge was addressed.

In contrast to the three successful Blockchain Summer Schools in 2016 to 2018, this year lifted it to the next level by establishing three parallel tracks: Basic, Advanced and Improving blockchain / DLT systems as a technology.

An amount of 5 ECTS was provided to PhD students who successfully pass the exam. To pass the exam participants presented their blockchain solutions at the end of the summer school and defended these. In addition, they produced 15 pages of report after the summer school and/or wrote a paper that is to be submitted to an academic outlet, such as conference or journal, coached by the summer school organisers. The presentation, report as well as the working paper were mandatory deliverables and after they have been assessed at a satisfactory level, the ECTS points were granted and a certificate issued.
Independently, all participants received a certificate that they participate in the summer school.

COINS supported Befekadu Gebraselase to attend the Blockchain Summer school in Copenhagen, Denmark.

DeepLearn 2019 was a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning. This is a branch of artificial intelligence covering a spectrum of current exciting machine learning research and industrial innovation that provides more efficient algorithms to deal with large-scale data in neurosciences, computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, human-computer interaction, drug discovery, biomedical informatics, healthcare, recommender systems, learning theory, robotics, games, etc. Renowned academics and industry pioneers lectured and shared their views with the audience.

Most deep learning subareas were displayed, and main challenges identified through 2 keynote lectures, 24 four-hour and a half courses, and 1 round table, which tackled the most active and promising topics. Interaction were a main component of the event.

An open session gave participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes. Moreover, there were two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.

DeepLearn 2019 was addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who wanted to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends. All found it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.

3 courses run in parallel during the whole event. Participants were able to freely choose the courses they wish to attend as well as to move from one to another.

COINS supported Ramtin Aryan to attend the DeepLearn 2019 in Warsaw, Poland.

The summer school was organized by Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad.

COINS supported Thor Tunge and Bor de Kock to attend the IACR Summer school “Euclidean lattices: theory and applications” in Kaliningrad, Russia.

The school was open to graduate students, researchers, and practitioners from academia and industry. The school aimed at bringing together members from the international security research community to debate contemporary issues in the area of privacy and security of blockchain technology and designing new cryptocurrencies with better security guarantees. The main part of the school consisted of lectures given by world-leading researchers in this area. The school brought the participants through technical aspects of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Security. It was also their intention to build strong research relations and exchange opportunities between the involved institutions and participants.

COINS supported Mayank Raikwar to attend the International Summer School on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Security in Padua, Italy.

The summer school was jointly organized by the Digital Security (DiS) group, Radboud University (The Netherlands), ETH Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (Switzerland) and Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb (Croatia).

The school aimed at bringing together Master/PhD students, academics and security experts from industry.
The focus of the summer school was on:

• Cryptography for the Internet
• Recent developments in cryptography
• Systems security
• Network security
• Machine learning in security & privacy
• Physical security & cryptographic implementations
• Privacy enhancing technologies

This year’s edition included a special one-day workshop on side-channel attacks and countermeasures. The workshop was sponsored by the Technology Foundation TTW (project 13499 – TYPHOON) from the Dutch government. They also had a hardware tutorial and run-time attack tutorial.

COINS supported Åvald Åslaugson Sommervoll and Farzane Karami to attend the Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy in Šibenik, Croatia.

Participants
IT security researchers and research groups of the following Universities/University Colleges are part of the network: Karlstad University, Chalmers University of Technology, Stockholm University, KTH, Skövde University, Linköping University, Örebro Univeristy, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Luleå University.

Activities
Annual 2-days SWITS seminars are held each spring in which:
– Supervisors give an overview to their research areas
– Ph.D. students have the possibility to present their research work, to get feedback and inspirations from other students and supervisors
– Research methodologies in IT security are discussed
– Introductory tutorials are given

This year the seminar SWITS seminar took place in June 3-4th, June 2019 in Karlstad, Sweden. COINS supported three PhD students to attend the seminar: Ahmed Amro, Livinus Obiora Nveke and Muhammad Mudasser Yamin.

The program included recent research in the sub-themes of consensus protocols, zero-knowledge proofs, privacy and anonymity-preserving techniques, language design and semantics for smart contracts, formal verification of cryptographic protocols and implementations, among other relevant topics. The workshop aimed to enable interdisciplinary research and foster collaboration among theoreticians and practitioners in blockchain protocols, distributed systems, and cryptography.

The TPBC19 was organized by Concordium Blockchain Research Centre Aarhus which is located at Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University.

COINS supported Mayank Raikwar to attend the TPBC 2019 in Aarhus, Denmark.

Boolean Functions and their Applications (BFA) 2019 took place in June 16-21st, 2019 in Florence, Italy.

Boolean functions and more generally all the discrete structures used in error correcting coding, cryptography or communications, are highly active areas of research. The workshop Boolean Functions and their Applications (BFA) was to provide a forum for researchers who are working on discrete functions and structures, particularly on Boolean functions, to exchange ideas and interests in open problems, and to further explore their applications in cryptography, error correcting codes and communications.

This workshop was organized by Selmer Center, University of Bergen in honor of Prof. Claude Carlet’s 70th birthday

COINS supported Irene Villa, Diana Davidova, Nikolay Kaleyski and Dan Zhang to attend the BFA 2019 in Florence, Italy.

BigDat 2019: 5th International Winter School on Big Data took place in January 7-11th, 2019 in Cambridge, UK.

BigDat 2019 was a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants on the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of big data, which covers a large spectrum of current exciting research and industrial innovation with an extraordinary potential for a huge impact on scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, business models, and society itself. Renowned academics and industry pioneers have lectured and shared their views with the audience.

Most big data subareas were displayed, namely foundations, infrastructure, management, search and mining, security and privacy, and applications (to biological and health sciences, to business, finance and transportation, to online social networks, etc.). Major challenges of analytics, management and storage of big data were identified through 2 keynote lectures, 24 four-hour courses, and 1 round table, which tackled the most active and promising topics. The organizers were convinced that outstanding speakers attracted the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction was a main component of the event.

An open session gave participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes. Moreover, there were two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.

Master’s students, PhD students, postdocs, and industry practitioners were typical profiles of participants. Overall, BigDat 2019 was addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who wanted to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends.

COINS supported Ambika Shrestha Chitrakar to attend the BigDat 2019 in Cambridge, UK.

Eurocrypt 2019 took place in Darmstadt, Germany on May 19-23 2019. It was organized by the Cryptoplexity group of TU Darmstadt.

COINS supported Åvald Sommervoll, Mayank Raikwar, Bor de Kock, Mattia Veroni and Navid Ghaedi Bardeh to attend the EUROCRYPT 2019 in Darmstadt, Germany.

Åvald Sommervoll has also attended two affiliated events.

1. Code-based cryptography is the area of research that focuses on the study of cryptosystems based on error-correcting codes, following the seminal work of McEliece and Niederreiter in the late 1970s – early 1980s. These systems have shown no vulnerabilities to quantum attackers and the relevant research branch is widely regarded as one of the most promising in the so-called area of Post-Quantum Cryptography. Current efforts in code-based cryptography are directed at producing fast, secure and efficient schemes. Research in this area has also been fostered by the recent NIST’s Post-Quantum Standardization call. The goal of this two-day workshop was to bring together the community to discuss recent developments, as well as introduce the field to anyone interested in discovering more about this research area. The program includes invited talks, contributed talks and dedicated discussion sessions.
2. The topic of quantum algorithms is an area attracting increasing interest and is of particular importance for post-quantum cryptography. In order to build or cryptanalyse proposed quantum-safe schemes, an awareness of applicable quantum algorithms is essential. This is especially relevant given the ongoing NIST post-quantum standardisation process. This workshop gave an overview of the use of quantum algorithms in cryptanalysis. The program was comprised of invited talks from expert speakers who have worked in the development of quantum algorithms and their application in cryptanalysis. The target audience was cryptographers who would like to learn details of how the various quantum algorithms work as well as how they can be applied in cryptanalysis.

Zero Knowledge Proofs are a cutting edge cryptographic tool that is starting to see adoption. This breakthrough technology form the basis of several cryptographic applications, improving the trade-offs between data privacy and integrity. Zero Knowledge Proofs allow a prover to convince a verifier that some computational statement is correct without revealing any information except the veracity of the statement.

ZKProof.org is an open initiative of industry and academia to standardize the use of zero knowledge proofs.

The first day was dedicated to an Research & Industry Showcase of existing work around zero knowledge proofs. During the last two days, there was a Standards Workshop, where participants discussed an initial set of community standards proposed by the community.

COINS supported Tjerand Silde to attend the Zero Knowledge Proof Standardization Workshop in Berkeley, USA.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in force. The course helped to understand what it takes to handle personal information, from one end of your organization to the other and to understand GDPR requirements. It explained which provisions apply to your own organization. It showed how to design a response that meets regulatory requirements and builds customers’ confidence. It gave the knowledge to become a GDPR-ready privacy pro or the certified DPO (data protection officer) so many organizations need.

GDPR compliance starts with knowledge.

COINS supported Shukun Tokas to attend the IAPP Europe Data Protection Congress 2018 Privacy training in Brussels, Belgium.

The school has focused on novel and advanced applications of cryptography and has discussed the impact of crypto research to society in a broader context. There were also lectures on good practices of innovation in cryptography and entrepreneurship as well as certification and standardisation of cryptographic primitives.

Since this was the last event of the ECRYPT-NET, the fellows from the network have been given the opportunity to present the research they have been performing during the last 3 years and to reflect on their experience and future opportunities.

The school was organised by Bart Preneel, Svetla Nikova and Saartje Verheyen (COSIC, KU Leuven).

COINS supported Dan Zhang and Irene Villa to attend The School on Applied Cryptography and its Impact on Society, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Malaga, Spain.

The annual Global Solutions Summit held by the Global Solutions Initiative brought together international research organizations, thought-leaders and decision-makers from across political, business and civic communities.

In 2019 1,600 participants from various sectors and 120 countries have registered for the summit, met with 221 speakers and participated in over 60 sessions. The summit aimed to provide policy recommendations on major G20 issues and thereby served as a stepping stone to the Japanese T20 Summit in May 2019 and the Japanese G20 Summit in June 2019. The Global Solutions Summit 2019 was a T20 Japan associated event.

The Global Solutions Summit 2019 focused on the priorities of the Japanese G20 Presidency, including policy recommendations on sustainable development, infrastructure finance, financial architecture, trade and investment, climate change, future of work and education, social cohesion and the future of politics, SME policy, policies for aging populations, and more. All discussions linked to the overarching narrative of recoupling economic, environmental and social progress. We furthermore highlighted all relevant issues for the future of multilateralism and strengthened the implementation site in our discussions.

COINS supported Desta Haileselassie Hagos to attend the Global Solutions Summit in Berlin, Germany.

Oxford Post-Quantum Cryptography Workshop took place in March (18-22th), 2019 at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, UK. The event brought together the top researchers in the field of Post-Quantum Cryptography for a week of fruitful discussions and exchange of ideas.

During the week, each morning there were two talks on various Post-Quantum fields. Each talk was an overview of the techniques used in each PQ field – lattice-based cryptography, hash-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, isogeny-based cryptography and multivariate-based cryptography – with a dedicated focus to NIST submissions, and their state-of-the-art cryptanalysis. One of the talks was on the NIST standardization process by Dustin Moody (NIST).

The morning talks were followed by (group) working sessions, where teams worked on previously agreed research problems.

COINS supported Wrya Kadir and Alessandro Budroni to attend the Oxford Post-Quantum Cryptography Workshop in Oxford, UK.

Over the last decade we have witnessed a series of impressive breakthroughs in data science and AI thanks to important advances in the algorithmic efficiency of data-driven approaches, such as deep learning. While the prime examples of disruptive progress have occurred in fields such as computer vision or natural language processing, there is still a huge potential for these improvements to carry over to other disciplines such as communications engineering. Incipient research has demonstrated the benefits of machine learning for the lower layers of the communication stack, including coding, modulation, equalization, detection, resource allocation, etc.

This training school  revolved around the application of Machine and Deep Learning techniques to the design of (beyond) 5G communication systems, with particular emphasis on physical and lower layers. The training school has comprised keynote and tutorial lectures by renowned researchers from academia and industry, focused presentations on recent advances in this research field and hands-on sessions.

The program included a student poster session and a Machine learning challenge, with prizes and awards for both activities.

COINS supported Ashish Rauniyar to attend the 6th Training School on Machine and Deep Learning Techniques for (Beyond) 5G Wireless Communication Systems in Barcelona, Spain.

JEEIT 2019 provided a unique forum to discuss practical approaches and state of the art findings in using the applied electrical engineering and information technologies to

solve national problems that face Jordan and other developing countries. JEEIT 2019 merged three conferences: The 5th IEEE Jordan Conf. on Applied Electrical Eng. and Computing Technologies (AEECT 2019), The 11th Jordanian Int’l Electrical and Electronic Eng. Conf. (JIEEEC 2019) and The 9th Int’l Conf. on Information Technology (ICIT 2019) in one big conference with one organizing committee, one program, and one proceedings.

COINS supported Ahmed Amro to attend the 2019 IEEE Jordan International Joint Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information Technology took place in Amman, Jordan.

Winter school on the mathematical foundations of asymmetric cryptography took place in Aussois, France, March 17–22, 2019.

This winter school on the mathematical foundations of asymmetric cryptography lasted 5 days. Diverse and particularly active aspects of this research area were covered, via mini-courses and talks.

This school was a session of the Etats de la Recherche organized by the French Mathematical Society (SMF). The school was targeted mathematicians and computer scientists with a background in algebra: M2 and PhD students, post-docs and researchers, not necessarily specialized in this area.

COINS supported Mattia Veroni to attend the winter school on the mathematical foundations of asymmetric cryptography in Aussois, France.

The summer school was jointly organized by the Digital Security (DiS) group, Radboud University (The Netherlands), ETH Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (Switzerland) and Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb (Croatia).

The school aimed at bringing together Master/PhD students, academics and security experts from industry. The focus of the summer school was on:

• Cryptography for the Internet
• Recent developments in symmetric key cryptography
• Security proofs in cryptography
• Wireless security
• Crypto for systems security
• Software and hardware security
• Privacy enhancing technologies
• Blockchain security (special session).

This year’s edition included a special session on distributed ledgers, where participants learned from several experts in the area about broad security aspects associated with these technologies. This session has been sponsored by the Glass Houses project, which is funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

COINS supported  Ijlal Loutfi to attend Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy 2018 in Šibenik, Croatia.

The school provided students/professionals with the prerequisite fundamentals of mathematics, statistics, programming and paper reading skills required for starting a career in AI research and with an overview of state-of-the-art research in ML and AI.
It also inspired early stage researchers from Nepal and the region to take on challenging high impact AI problems in visual recognition, natural language processing, medical science etc.
The summer school provided a venue for sharing and discussing cutting-edge technological advances in AI among both veteran and young researchers from around the world and created new opportunities for the participants and well as played an important role in democratizing AI by inspiring the next generation of leaders in AI from developing countries.

The Nepal School consisted of series of lectures, lab sessions, and scientific paper reading/writing sessions given by invited world-class experts. The experts included a number of alumni who graduated from the local engineering schools and had good knowledge of the teaching methodology there and the key gaps that need to be filled. The social events (a day hiking and dinner) provided ample opportunities for the like-minded people to network and collaborate.

COINS supported Ashish Rauniyar and Debesh Jha to attend First Nepal Winter School in AI in Kathmandu, Nepal.

The school has aimed at students at all levels (BSc/MSc/PhD) and postdocs. The school has featured 4 introductory mini-courses, special talks, and talks contributed by the participants.

COINS supported  Dan Zhang to attend the summer school Number theory and coding theory – contemporary applications in security in Turku, Finland.

Real World Crypto Symposium aimed to bring together cryptography researchers with developers implementing cryptography in real-world systems. The conference goal was to strengthen the dialogue between these two communities. Topics covered focus on uses of cryptography in real-world environments such as the Internet, the cloud, and embedded devices.

The RWC series of events was initiated by Kenny Paterson and Nigel Smart in 2012, as part of a celebration at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. At that point the rather less punchy title was Is Cryptographic Theory Practically Relevant?. The event was an amazing success and within a week we had been contacted about organizing a follow up event; and so Real World Cryptography was born.

Talks were selected on the basis of impact on the real world (potential or current), interest to the audience, and our perceived quality of the speaker.

COINS supported  Tjerand Silde to attend Real World Crypto 2019 in San Jose, USA.

Smart grid technology is currently entering the electrical market by the deployment of smart meters. Electric vehicles introduce new challenges on the grid capacity but may also support grid stability. Volatile renewable energy challenges grid stability. Wind power electricity produced at shore regions has to be transported to industrial regions by high-capacity power links. Local photovoltaic sources may make residents independent for some time periods. The new power grid becomes smart, when all prosumers can communicate fast, securely, and reliably.

In its 2018 Edition, IEEE SmartGridComm kept its acronym, but the full title of the conference has been changed to IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids. This enlarged the scope of the conference towards more general cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things, which were research topics that become inseparable from the future smart energy.

COINS supported Handunneththi V. Kalpanie Mendis to attend IEEE SmartGridComm 2018 in Aalborg, Denmark.

COINS supported Navid Ghaedi Bardeh to attend Symmetric Proof Techniques school in Bertinoro, Italy.

NordSec is an annual research conference series that has been running since 1996. The events brought together security researchers from the Nordic countries, Northern Europe, and beyond. In addition to being a venue for academic publishing, NordSec was an important meeting place for university faculty, students, and industry researchers and experts from the region. The proceedings consisted of peer-reviewed articles and are published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

COINS supported Åvald Sommervoll to attend NordSec 2018 in Oslo, Norway.

With the increasing focus on modelling and simulation in the fields of cyber-networks, data mining, cyber security, distributed computing, mobile computing, cognitive computing, cloud computing, computing tools, applications, simulation tools, system performance and data and computer communications, the demand for high quality research outcomes has never been greater. ITNAC has been the forum for researchers and engineers to present and discuss topics related to advanced computing and data communication network technologies, services and applications.

Novel contributions were presented in the form of keynote speeches by international experts, peer-reviewed technical papers, and posters. ITNAC 2018 captured highly innovative and state-of-the-art research from academia, industry and standardization bodies.

COINS supported Aryan Ramtin to attend ITNAC 2018 in Sydney, Australia.

Boolean functions and more generally all the discrete structures used in error correcting coding, cryptography or communications, are highly active areas of research. The workshop Boolean Functions and their Applications (BFA) was to provide a forum for researchers who are working on discrete functions and structures, particularly on Boolean functions, to exchange ideas and interests in open problems, and to further explore their applications in cryptography, error correcting codes and communications.

COINS supported Diana Davidova, Irene Villa, Nikolay Kaleyski and Dan Zhang to attend The 3rd International Workshop on Boolean Functions and their Applications in Loen, Norway.

The Conference was dedicated to the memory of Emil Artin, an Austrian mathematician of Armenian descent. He was one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. The scientific talks involved all branches of mathematics and its applications. There were around 100 participants from all over the world, for example, Russia, Italy, France, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, USA, China, South Africa, Brazil and more.

The aim of the conference was to provide a forum where specialists will meet to share ideas of the latest research in Algebraic Structures, Mathematical Logic, Number Theory, Pure and Applied Mathematics, Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science.

COINS supported Diana Davidova, Nikolay Kaleyski and Irene Villa to attend the Emil Artin International Conference in Yerevan, the Republic of Armenia.

The aim of the NISK conference series was to be the principal Norwegian research venue for presenting and discussing developments in the field of ICT security and privacy, and bringing together people from universities, industry, and public authorities.

There were invited both national and international contributions by
researchers, practitioners, and PhD- and Master thesis students
presenting new problems and solutions within topics on ICT security.

COINS supported many PhD students and former students to attend to attend the NISK 2018 conference in Longyearbyen, Norway. Here are they travel reports:

• Berglind Fjola Smaradottir
• Muhammad Mudassar Yamin
• Ramtin Aryan
• Aida Mehdipourpirbazari
• Cristina Viorica Heghedus
• Manish Shrestha 
• Dhanya Therese Jose 
• Songpu Ai
• Isaac Andrés Canales Martinez
• Tjerand Silde
• Nikita Rajendra Karandikar
• Elahe Fazeldehkordi
• Shukun Tokas
• Alessandro Budroni
• Jayachander Surbiryala
• Andrea Tenti
• Merve Bas Seyyar
• Shao-Fang Wen
• Nikolay Stoyanov Kaleyski
• Navid Ghaedi Bardeh
• Jens-Petter Sandvik
• Dan Zhang
• Irene Villa
• Xiaojie Zhu
• Martin Brodin
• Ambika Shrestha Chitrakar
• Diana Davidova
• Parisa Rezaee Borj

SSIC’2018 was the third conference in the area of cyber security focusing on the industry control system, cloud platform and smart cities. City and industrial control infrastructures are changing with new interconnected systems for monitoring, control and automation. The conference provided an international forum for scientists, researchers, professionals, industry practitioners, policy makers, and users to exchange ideas, techniques and tools, and share experience related to all practical and theoretical aspects of communications and network security.

SSIC’2018 conference was technically co-sponsored by IEEE. Topics of interest encompassed not only all practical and theoretical aspects of communications, and network security, but also security mechanism put into some critical applications.

COINS supported Xiaojie Zhu to attend the SSIC 2018 in Shanghai, China.

CrossFyre aimed to bring together female researchers in cyber security (e.g., in cryptography, information security, safety, but not only), to promote their research topics and help develop the careers of women in science and engineering. Thus, CrossFyre’s main cohort was generally formed of female early-career researchers (ECRs), as well as female undergraduate students interested in or working in cybersecurity.

COINS supported Martha Norberg Hovd to attend the CrossFyre 2018 in Guildford, UK.

The summer school has featured a teaching staff of well-known researchers and was targeted at Ph.D. students, engineers, and junior faculty. The first summer school was focused on advanced topics in Distributed Systems. The summer school featured five 50-minute lectures a day on August 15, 16, and 17, for a total of 15 lectures. In the evenings there were social activities and/or poster sessions. The summer school was co-sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council and the Corpore Sano project.

COINS supported Ramtin Aryan, Shukun Tokas and Ijlal Loutfi to attend the ACM SIGOPS Summer School on Advanced Topics in Systems in Tromsø, Norway.

ISSAC 2018 was the premier conference for research in symbolic computation and computer algebra. ISSAC 2018 was the 43rd meeting in the series, which started in 1966 and has been held annually since 1981. The conference presented a range of invited speakers, tutorials, poster sessions, software demonstrations and vendor exhibits with a center-piece of contributed research papers.

COINS supported Alessandro Budroni to attend the ISSAC 2018 in New York, USA.

The goal of this summer school was to bring together the world-class researchers in Fog Computing with undergraduate, graduate students and interested researchers from academia and engineers from industry, to educate the audience on both basics and recent advancements in Fog Computing overview, IoT, Optimization, Big Data, and Deep Learning, and to encourage collaborations on related topics. This summer school also included a 24 hours’ hackathon after the two-days’ classes on Fog Computing, to encourage the students gather to collaborate and challenge themselves to build a project about Fog Computing from start to finish. It was an invaluable opportunity for the participants to gain coding experience, learn fog computing, and win awesome prizes.

COINS supported Desta Haileselassie Hagos and Ashish Rauniyar to attend the 2018 Summer School on “Fog Computing” in Shanghai, China.     

EUROCRYPT 2018 is the 37th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Covering all aspects of cryptology, including theoretical foundations, deployment of cryptographic schemes, cryptanalysis of widely used standards, cryptographic protocols, quantum cryptography, and cryptographic currencies.

This year’s edition took place in Tel Aviv, Israel on April 29-May 3 2018, at the Dan Panorama’s conference center. EUROCRYPT 2018 was one of the flagship conferences of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and was organized by the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center.

COINS supported Alessandro Budroni, Andrea Tenti and Isaac Canales Martinez to attend the EUROCRYPT 2018 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Over 1,100 participants, official delegates from T20 Argentina 2018 and T20 Japan 2019, Nobel Laureates and German Chancellor Angela Merkel – this was the Global Solutions Summit 2018 on 28 and 29 May in Berlin.

The Global Solutions Summit brought together policy thinkers and policy leaders from around the world. In over 40 sessions, insights and ideas on the most pressing issues of our times were discussed, focused primarily around the Task Forces of the Argentinian T20 and the priorities of the Argentinian G20 Presidency. This sets the corner stone for key policy recommendations that will recouple the world. 
We also welcomed more than 120 Young Global Changers at the summit, representing the next generation of global problem solvers. Throughout the summit as well as during the Summer School they developed specific ideas on recoupling politics, economics and business.

COINS supported Ashish Rauniyar to attend the Global Solutions Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

The training school was co-organised with the COST action IC1306 “Cryptography for Secure Digital Interaction” and contained lectures on symmetric cryptography as well as lectures and discussions on blockchain technologies.

One of the focuses of the school was on modes of operation and authenticated encryption. Many applications require to guarantee both confidentiality and integrity of the data. A standard algorithm for symmetric encryption consists in using a block cipher, typically the AES, together with a mode of operation (e.g. CBC or CTR) which enables to handle variable-length messages. There is no such solution for authenticated encryption which is satisfactory both in terms of performance and security. Therefore, the on-going Caesar competition has been launched in 2014 in order to design and analyze new authenticated encryption schemes suitable for widespread adoption.

One of the hot topics in cryptology at the moment is blockchain. Bitcoin is the first example of a blockchain and it has spawned a lot of attention. A block chain is constructed using a cryptographic hash function. Cryptologists do not seem to agree on the impact and importance of the blockchain technology. Thus, there was a session in the school with different views on the topic.

The goal of the school was to give students a thorough introduction to the state-of-the-art within symmetric cryptology covering both the theoretical side (design and cryptanalysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives and provable security) and the practical side (practical cryptanalysis in exercise sessions). The school had two streams: basic principles of symmetric cryptography and advanced topics, like modes of operation, authenticated encryption and blockchain technologies.

The school was suitable for Master students with a background in cryptography and security; PhD students and security experts from industry.

COINS supported Diana Davidova and Navid Ghaedi Bardeh to attend the COST Training School on Symmetric Cryptography and Blockchain in Torremolinos, Spain.

The Norwegian Information Security Conference (no. Norsk Informasjonssikkerhetskonferanse – NISK) is a national conference that brings together researchers in IT-security, mainly from national community, but also from the international community.

NISK 2017 was organized in conjunction with NIK, NOKOBIT, and UDIT conferences. The conference was supported by the IKTPluss programme of the Norwegian Research Council (NFR).

COINS supported Ijlal Loutfi to attend the NISK 2017 conference in Oslo, Norway.

OffensiveCon Berlin was a highly technical international security conference focused on offensive security only. The aim of OffensiveCon was to bring the community of hackers together for high quality and deep technical talks, engaging and renowned technical trainings. The talks at OffensiveCon were focused on offensive IT security topics such as vulnerability discovery, advanced exploitation techniques and reverse engineering.

The conference brought superb and unique speakers while offering affordable ticket prices for everyone. The conference was constructed as a single track of talks for two full days as well as technical trainings held in the days before the conference. Moreover, the conference was hosting lightning talks as well, where attendees had a chance to present any topic related to offensive security for 15 minutes to the entire audience.

COINS supported Ramtin Aryan to attend the Offensive Security Conference 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

22nd of September Kyiv became an epicentre of blockchain-insights and expertise. Leading world and Ukrainian experts shared relevant information on successful applications of advanced blockchain technology in various industries and told about fintech trends, the future of ICO and crypto currency. BlockchainUA brought together 1000+ participants, including leading industry experts, representatives of the state sector, business and financial sector, investors, start-ups and IT-developers.

More than 50 experts from 10 countries spoke about their experiences and development opportunities of blockchain technology in the financial industry.

The conference included the following platforms: Main Stage that covered the issues of key blockchain trends, practical application of the technology and its prospects; Product Stage, where product solutions with the use of distributed technologies were represented; and the Tech Stage, where a pitch-session for start-ups took place.
All participants were able to visit exhibition area – Startup Alley, where leading blockchain industry companies presented their solutions.

COINS supported Dmytro Piatkivskyi to attend the BlockchainUA in Kyiv, Ukraine.

CHES is the leading conference on hardware security and the largest international cryptography conference.

The annual CHES conference highlighted new results in the design and analysis of cryptographic hardware and software implementations. The workshop built a valuable bridge between the research and cryptographic engineering communities and attracted participants from industry, academia, and government organizations. In addition to a single track of high-quality presentations, CHES 2017 offered invited talks, tutorials, a poster session, and a rump session.

COINS supported Xiaojie Zhu to attend the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan.

The use of data science for cyber-security applications is a relatively new paradigm. This includes deployment of statistical methodology, machine learning, and Big Data analytics for network modelling, anomaly detection, forensics, risk management, and more.

This conference aimed to showcase cutting-edge research in statistical cyber-security in academia, business and government, as well as helped to align these endeavours.

This was the third of a biennial series of workshops on the topic.

COINS supported Ijlal Loutfi to attend the Data Science for Cyber-Security conference in London, UK.

The MMS workshop was held in Svolvær, in the archipelago Lofoten, Norway during September 4-8, 2017.

The program was constructed around a series of tutorial talks by the number of invited speakers. Topics included:

• foundational theory in cryptography
• the design, proposal, and analysis of cryptographic primitives
• coding theory
• sequences and their applications in coding theory and cryptography
• correlation and transformation of Boolean functions
• finite fields theory and its application in cryptography in cryptography.

COINS supported six students to attend the Mathematical Methods for Cryptography workshop in Svolvær, Norway.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports:

• Bo Sun
• Irene Villa
• Navid Ghaedi Bardeh
• Isaac Andres Canales Martinez
• Andrea Tenti
• Nikolay Stoyanov Kaleyski

Workshops were held in conjunction with the Symposium, on September 14-15, 2017

COINS supported four students to attend the ESORICS 2017 in Oslo, Norway.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports:

• Dmytro Piatkivskyi
• Sergii Banin
• Ijlal Loutfi
• Christopher Carr

The Secure Cloud Services and Storage Workshop 2017 was held in Oslo, Norway on the 10th of September 2017.

COINS supported three students to attend the Secure Cloud Services and Storage Workshop 2017s in Oslo, Norway.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports:

• Britta Hale
• Martin Strand
• Ijlal Loutfi

The BFA  workshop 2017 was held in Os, south of Bergen, Norway during July 3-8, 2017.

Topics included:

• foundational theory of Boolean functions and discrete structures
• the design, proposal, and analysis of cryptographically significant (vectorial) Boolean functions
• the theory and construction of quantum Boolean functions
• the theory of finite fields and its applications in cryptography and coding theory
• the applications of Boolean and vectorial functions to FHE, SCA counter-measures, affine extractors etc.

COINS supported three students to attend the Boolean Functions and their Applications in Os, Norway.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports:

• Irene Villa
• Bo Sun
• Navid Ghaedi Bardeh

COINS supported two students to attend the Summer School on Cybersecurity and Privacy (CySeP) in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports:

• Jayachander Surbiryala
• Xiaojie Zhu

COINS supported Navid Ghaedi Bardeh to attend the Spring School on Lattice-Based Cryptography in Oxford, England.

The 2nd EuroS&P edition was held on April 26-28, 2017 in Paris at UPMC Campus Jussieu, right before EUROCRYPT 2017, which also has happened in Paris. The affiliated events were organized jointly with EUROCRYPT on April 29-30, 2017.

COINS supported three students to attend the 2nd EuroS&P in Paris, France.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports.

• Romina Muka
• Chris Carr
• Ashish Rauniyar

The conference brought together experts and young researchers from all over the world to exchange ideas and discuss recent developments in the areas that have interested Pr. C. Carlet. The presentations focused on some of the many topics that Claude has worked on during his career; like error correcting codes, Boolean functions for cryptography and bent functions, substitution boxes for block ciphers, authentication schemes, secret sharing, side channel attacks, and recently fully homomorphic encryption; and other topics as well, like information theory, algebraic cryptanalysis and polynomial systems, quantum cryptology, protocols based on the identity or attributes, algebraic identification, signature and non-repudiation, communications and network security, Internet of Things and Mobile agents security.

The presentations focused on some of the many topics that Claude has worked on during his career; like error correcting codes, Boolean functions for cryptography and bent functions, substitution boxes for block ciphers, authentication schemes, secret sharing, side channel attacks, and recently fully homomorphic encryption; and other topics as well, like information theory, algebraic cryptanalysis and polynomial systems, quantum cryptology, protocols based on the identity or attributes, algebraic identification, signature and non-repudiation, communications and network security, Internet of Things and Mobile agents security.

COINS supported Irene Villa to attend the Codes, Cryptology and Information Security Conference in Rabat, Morocco.

The Security Divas 2017 conference took place on the 26th and 27th of January at Strand Hotell in Gjøvik for seven years in a row and collected over 160 women.

Women with an interest in information security and ICT were gathered at Security Divas 2017, a two-day conference focused on the topic of “confidence and trust in the digital society”. New for this year’s conference was a setup of two slots at the end on the first day. One track was about “the digital society” and the second track was more technical and referred to “technology and development.”

Security Divas since its establishment in 2010 has grown to be an important network for women who have also been added positive international attention. It was a great pleasure over the years to have more lectures in English, including Aglika Klayn from the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) in Europol, this year. Ms. Klayn opened the conference with a post where she explained EC3 its role in fighting cybercrime.

The conference place was full of participants, and professional expert presenters contributed with different perspectives on the topic “security and confidence in the digital society.” There were many opportunities to present and to acquire new insights and be inspired by others.

COINS supported Tetiana Yarygina to attend the Security Divas  2017 in Gjøvik, Norway. Here is her travel report

International Conference BIP001 was a focused and compact meeting of blockchain professionals, dedicated to discussing the application of Blockchain technology to existing problems in the society. The aim of the conference was to gather the greatest influencers within the blockchain space and combine several days of serious discussions with excellent networking.

COINS supported Dmytro Piatkivskyi to attend the BIP001 2017 in Kiev, Ukraine.

The conference was comprised of the NIK, NOKOBIT, NISK, and UDIT conferences which are all well-established, Norwegian, academic conferences spanning different branches of ICT, computer science, information sciences, and information systems.

The conference was supported by the IKTPluss programme of the Norwegian Research Council.

COINS supported 5 students to attend the NISKt 2016 in Bergen, Norway. Here are their travel reports:

• Dmytro Piatkivskyi
• Felix Schuckert
• Bo Sun
• Xiaojie Zhu
• Manish Shrestha          

The school brought together PhD students, postdoc researchers and security experts from industry of

• Secure hardware and physical security
• Cryptography for the Internet
• Formal methods in cryptography
• Wireless security
• Crypto for systems security
• Privacy enhancing technologies
• Traffic analysis and countermeasures
• Recent developments in symmetric-key crypto

COINS supported Ilir Bytyci to attend the Summer school on real-world crypto and privacy 2016 in in Šibenik, Croatia. Here is his travel report

The northernmost crypto workshop ever organised, Arctic Crypt 2016, took place in the period of July 17-22 in spectacular arctic surroundings under the midnight sun in Longyearbyen, Svalbard at 78° north.

The program was constructed around a series of 10-12 invited tutorial talks on any cryptographic topic including, but not limited to:

• Foundational theory
• The design, proposal, and analysis of cryptographic primitives
• Crypto protocols, side-channel attacks, and other aspects of implementation
• Information theoretic approaches to digital security
• Recent trends in cryptography.

COINS supported 7 students to attend the Arctic Crypt 2016 in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Here are their travel reports:

1. Britta Hale
2. Martin Strand
3. Herman Galteland
4. Tetiana Yarygina
5. Stian Fauskanger
6. Bjørn Greve
7. Shahram Rasoolzadeh

IACR Summer School on Blockchain Technologies “From cryptographic e-cash to modern cryptocurrencies” was the the first summer school on blockchains and cryptocurrencies. The schooling was focused on helping “bridge the gap between the cryptocurrency community and academia”.

IACR was thrilled to host the event with many leading experts from academic backgrounds and executive positions in the industry. Students, researchers or professionals that were interested in the disruptive tech joined the classes in Greece.

COINS supported Chris Carr to attend the IACR Summer School Blockchain Technologies  2016 in Corfu, Greece. Here is his travel report

Half of the US workforce is women and yet only 8-11% is in cybersecurity. So, to address the undeniable critical shortage of cybersecurity professionals in this country, it only makes sense to recruit from the other half …. to create opportunities and pathways such that more women can consider cybersecurity as a viable career option! Not to mention the power of diversity in solving complex challenges unique to this field. The WiCyS conference was created out of this common sense. WiCyS has become a community of opportunity/advice/answer seekers and providers, mentors and mentees, speakers and listeners, and most importantly, a community of peers.

COINS supported DijanaVukovic to attend the WICYS Women in Cybersecurity conference 2016 in Dallas. Here is her travel report.

COINS supported Antonio Gonzalez Burgueño to attend the ICISSP Doctoral Consortium 2016 in Rome. Here is his travel report.

COINS supported Seraj Fayyad to attend the HackCon 2016 conference in Oslo. Here is his travel report.

COINS supported Seraj Fayyad to attend the SECENTIS Winter School 2016 in Trento, Italy. Here is his travel report.

Took place in June 15th-16th in Oslo, Norway, where participants got to experience world-class speakers like Raj Samani, Rik Fergusson and Ramsés Gallego, a fantastic three-track program, lots of perks and extras, and a hard-hitting rock-festival-party in the evening!

Some of the highlights of the program was: Jim Reavis, the CEO of Cloud Security Alliance gave a keynote on cloud security. The Cumulus-Project run a half-day workshop on certification of clouds services. A full-day track of e-health and government in joint-operation with IKT-Norge.

COINS supported Vivek Agrawal to attend the Cloud Security Alliance 2015 conference in Oslo. Here is his travel report.

NISK brought together people working in ICT security mainly from the national community, but also from the international community.

COINS student members participated in NISK.

Here are their pictures and reflection reports.

• Andrii Shalaginov

• Yi-Ching Liao

• ISC2015_report by Tetiana Yarygina

• ISC2015 report by Håkon Gunleifsen

• ISC2015 report by Martin Strand
• ISC2015 report by Yi-Ching Liao

NISK brings together people in all areas of information security. Ph.D. students can submit a paper to be presented and published in the conference proceedings after successful peer review. NISK publications give publication points at level 1. There will be a Ph.D. student seminar co-located with NISK probably on 20/11 and 21/11. Exact date, time and programme TBA.

Conference homepage: http://www.frisc.no/arrangementer/nisk-2013/

COINS student members can apply for travel support to participate in NISK. To foster cooperation between Norwegian and Swedish Ph.D. students, COINS invites up to four students from the Swedish SWITS network to participate in NISK.

NordSec addresses a broad range of topics within IT security with the aims of bringing together computer security researchers from around the world and of encouraging interaction between academia and industry. In 2013 the conference has special focus on the security challenges of cyber-physical systems as found within areas as for example avionics, automotive, energy, healthcare and consumer appliances.

Traditionally the conference is arranged in the Nordic countries and in 2013 it will be in Ilulissat (Jakobshavn) situated 200 km north of the Arctic Circle and neighbouring the UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre of Ilulissat Icefjord. Travel to Ilulissat will be limited so early registration and booking is encouraged; please consult the web-page http://nordsec2013.imm.dtu.dk for the latest information.

Student members of COINS can apply for travel support to attend this Nordic information security event.