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Applied Cryptography

Course description:
In this course, we start with a brief introduction to cryptography over the first few lectures (which we do in more detail during our undergraduate class on “Introduction to Cryptology”). Afterward, we analyze in detail several popular cryptographic applications, such as TLS (de-facto standard for secure Internet communications) and EMV (de-facto standard for payment card transactions), focusing on their security properties as well as recent attacks and defenses. Last year we also had an invited lecture on Javacard implementations and attacks.
 During the labs, we implement the concepts learned in class, using the public and widely used code and public keys/certificate available for the applications explored (e.g. TLS and EMV).
 
Short bio:
Marios Choudary received the Diploma engineer degree from the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2008 and the M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees, in 2010 and 2014, in computer science from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a Lecturer in computer science with the University Politehnica of Bucharest. His research interests include authentication, security protocols, and side-channel analysis.
 
Related research:
During the past few years, within the H2020 SSICLOPS project, we have been developing a new key exchange protocol that can protect against active attackers without requiring previous knowledge or trusted third parties. Marios is also working on efficient evaluation methods for security devices (see the recent CHES presentation/paper). Furthermore, he is working with his master students on the analysis of side-channel attacks on FPGA platforms, System-on-Chip devices, and trusted execution environments (SGX/Trustzone).
 
Master website: http://sas.cs.pub.ro