D-INFK news channel

On 4 and 5 April, the cyber competition Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge 2024 took place. Four teams from ETH Zurich participated in the challenge and one of them, team CyBerg, won first place. Big congratulations!

Public cloud services employ special security technologies. Professor Shweta Shinde has, together with her Secure & Trustworthy Systems Group, discovered a gap in the latest security mechanisms used by AMD and Intel chips. This affects major cloud providers.  

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a smartphone app that can be used to check the authenticity of documents and other items. Extracts from the debt enforcement register of the City of Zurich are being made forgery-​proof as part of a pilot project.

The seventh edition of the Informatiktage will take place from 18 to 23 March 2024. The Department of Computer Science and the IT Services of ETH Zurich are once again participating as partners this year. The carefully curated programme offers something for everyone – from curious beginners to experienced experts.

Team nETHics, composed of ETH students and trained by the student organisation ETH Cyber Group, placed second at this year's Geneva Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge. Congratulations!

Given the sharp rise in security attacks on systems, networks and programs, cyber security has become a crucial topic. In response to this phenomenon, the joint-degree Master’s programme in Cyber Security was established in 2019 by ETH Zurich and EPFL. We spoke with both professors and students who have first-hand knowhow of the programme, gaining insights into their experiences and perspectives.

The new Internet protocol SCION, developed by our Professor Adrian Perrig among others, solves the fundamental problem of meeting the security demands of the modern digital economy. The technology is currently being used by the Swiss National Bank and the financial industry to secure data communication.

Professor Kenny Paterson, doctoral student Matteo Scarlata and Master’s student Kien Tuong Truong (meanwhile also a doctoral student) of the Applied Cryptography Group conducted a security analysis of the Threema messenger application and found vulnerabilities.

The Engineering for Humanitarian Action initiative by the ICRC, ETH Zurich and EPFL aims to use innovative technologies to help people in need. One of the projects offering tangible improvements is the secure digial infrastructure project, based on the SCION network technology and involving D-INFK professors Srdjan Capkun and Adrian Perrig.

Florian Tramèr joined the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in August 2022 as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Get to know him in this short interview.

Founded by students, the ETH organisation Cyber Group ETH Student Initiative is dedicated to cyber security. Its co-founder and former president, Karin Holzhauser, and current president Christian Knabenhans explain where Cyber Group came from and where it’s headed.

Thirty international teams competed virtually in the Geneva Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge 2022, including two teams of ETH students. Both made it all the way to the finals, winning second and fourth place, and a special prize. Before the competition, all students went through a rigorous two-month training programme provided by the student organisation Cyber Group.

Kristina Hostáková, postdoc in the Foundations of Cryptography Group at the Department of Computer Science was given the CAST/GI Promotion Award IT-Sicherheit. The award honours doctoral theses that promote advancements in IT security and make IT applications more secure.

In an interview with EPFL, Alessandro Stolfo, doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science and recipient of the third recipient of a Doctoral CYD Fellowship, talks about his current research and shares tips for future applicants.

Digitalisation offers a wealth of new opportunities – and criminals and hostile states are only too happy to exploit them. Protecting against such attacks requires a broad range of measures. Adrian Perrig, professor in the ETH Zurich Network Security Group, is confident that the shortcomings of the modern internet can be fixed.

In an interview with EPFL, Adalsteinn Jonsson, Master’s student at the Department of Computer Science and recipient of the seventh CYD Master Thesis Fellowship, talks about his current project and the advantages of conducting his thesis at the CYD Campus.

Cookie consent banners only appear to give users control over their data. Researchers from the Information Security Group have developed a browser extension that uses machine learning to recognise and block unnecessary cookies.

In an interview with the ETH School for Continuing Education, Christian Kunz, a student in the CAS ETH in Cyber Security, explains that the continuing education has bridged the gap between law, with whose system, possibilities and limitations he is familiar, and technology, in which he is fascinated but has no previous knowledge.

The alternative internet SCION, invented and developed at ETH Zurich by Adrian Perrig, provides fast, secure and reliable connections for data transfer. It is now available to any ETH lecturers, researchers or employees with special security, performance or reliability requirements.

During her visit to ETH Zurich, Defence Minister Viola Amherd sketched a picture of an unstable, unpredictable world to which Swiss security policy must adapt. D-INFK contributes to Swiss cyber security through a number of initiatives and projects, including the secure internet architecture SCION and the Cyber Security Master's programme.

Researchers from the Applied Cryptography group led by Professor Kenny Paterson collaborated with scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London to identify several cryptographic weaknesses in the popular messaging platform Telegram.

In safety-​critical applications like railway inspection, the use of deep neural networks is limited today. SBB, Siemens Mobility, ETH AI Center and the spin-​off LatticeFlow from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich joined forces to make artificial intelligence trustworthy.

Christina Pöpper, a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), studied and earned her doctorate at ETH Zurich, where she also advocated for women at the Department of Computer Science. Today, she shows her students the elegance and beauty of computer science.

In this interview with the European Research Council, Professor Martin Vechev of the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab talks about his ERC-funded work, AI breakthroughs, and Europe’s future in the field of AI.

Kristina Hostáková joined Professor Dennis Hofheinz’s research group at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science last December as a postdoc. In this interview, she talks about asymmetric cryptography, her experiences on the path to ETH Zurich and the promotion of women in computer science.

In the third episode of the uncertainty series of the ETH podcast, senior lecturer Myriam Dunn Cavelty and D-INFK student Karin Holzhauser talk about cybersecurity and its role in computer science.

After finding a vulnerability in certain credit cards for the first time last year, three researchers in the Information Security Group at ETH Zurich were now able to outsmart the PIN codes for other payment cards, namely Mastercard and Maestro.

Shweta Shinde joined the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in October 2020 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Get to know her in this short interview.

Dr. Zuzana Trubini and Dr. Martin Hirt receive the prestigious TCC Test-of-Time Award for their 2008 paper titled "Perfectly-Secure MPC with Linear Communication Complexity".

DeepCode, a spin-​off of the Secure, Reliable and Intelligent Systems Lab that built the first AI platform for code, is to be acquired by Snyk, a world leader in developer-​first security code analysis.

Larger amounts can only be debited from credit cards with a PIN code. Three of our researchers have now discovered a flaw in the security system.

Twenty international teams competed in the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge 2020, including five teams from ETH Zurich. In an unprecedented winning streak, the ETH Zurich teams not only took the top five places, but also won all the special prizes. The thorough preparation by the student organisation Cyber Group was one of the reasons for their success.

The Cyber Group – ETH Student Initiative prepares ETH Zurich students taking part in the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, where participants need to respond to a realistic cyberattack scenario using not only computer science, but also political and oratory skills.

The pilot phase for the long-​awaited COVID-​19 tracing app developed by ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne has started. Prof. Srdjan Čapkun explains what makes it special. 

The committee of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy has honoured Prof. Adrian Perrig with four Test-of-Time awards for papers published in the 12-year period between 1995 and 2006 of which he was an author.

The internet has changed our lives in positive ways, but it also has its risks. Adrian Perrig and his team are set on creating an Internet where society would regain more control.

Prof. Srdjan Capkun and his ‘Snappy’ team have developed a system that speeds up cryptocurrency transactions: a secure, practical and fast, like a snap of the fingers, solution.

Congratulations to Prof. Onur Mutlu for receiving the prestigious award given for innovative and impactful contributions to computer memory systems.

Dennis Hofheinz ist ab Februar 2020 offiziell als ordentlicher Professor für Informatik am Departement Informatik der ETH Zürich tätig. In diesem kurzen Interview stellt er sich vor.

The team from ChainSecurity AG, an ETH spin-off from the Department of Computer Science, joined PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Switzerland to further accelerate market growth and product development.

Professor Kenneth Paterson officially joined the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich at the beginning of April 2019. He will be leading the newly established Applied Cryptography group. Get to know him in this short interview.

ETH doctoral students of computer science show how linking two popular technologies can have highly problematic consequences for web services.

The foundations for internet communication were laid down in the previous century and have undergone very little modernisation since. With their spin-off Anapaya Systems, Adrian Perrig, David Basin and Peter Müller, professors at the ETH Zurich Department of Computer Science, want to bring the internet into the 21st century and make it a secure and reliable means of communication.

ETH Zurich spin-​off ChainSecurity has discovered a vulnerability in a scheduled upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain platform – in the nick of time.

Researchers in the Information Security Group subjected the upcoming 5G mobile communication standard to a comprehensive security analysis. Their conclusion: data protection is improved in comparison with the previous standards 3G and 4G. However, security gaps are still present.

In June 2018, the start-​up ChainSecurity released Securify, a novel tool that enables an easier and more thorough scanning process for smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem. Dr Petar Tsankov, chief scientist at ChainSecurity and research scientist at ETH Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab at the Department of Computer Science, gives an insight into the novel technology and its benefits.

Would you consider connecting to your bank account in an internet café? Too risky? ETH researcher Aritra Dhar explains how to make sure that the message you send is the message received, even in a hostile environment.

Digitalisation simplifies many aspects of our everyday life, but it also creates new risks. Srdjan Capkun, Professor for Information Security, explains how to find the right balance between convenience and security.

A start-​up formed by a group of IT specialists at ETH Zurich has come up with a simple and user-​friendly way to enhance network security. The Futurae team has already won 130,000 Swiss francs start-​up capital from Venture Kick.

An ETH spin-​off, xorlab, has ambitious plans: it has developed a unique IT security solution that provides more effective protection against hacker attacks. Now the product is about to undergo crucial trials in a real business environment.

ETH Zurich is expanding its Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC). A donation of five million Swiss francs has been made by Zürcher Kantonalbank to the ETH Zurich Foundation specifically for this purpose.

The internet has provided people with unprecedented access to information, transforming network and information access into a quasi public good. Societies increasingly rely on the internet, making it a key pillar of public life in modern societies. Given its importance, a key question is how to improve the internet to achieve a level of reliability that is commensurate with its importance.

At first glance, the internet seems to work reliably. A closer inspection, however, reveals some serious flaws, including large-​scale breakdowns and unwelcome data redirections. Computer science professor Adrian Perrig now proposes a new internal architecture to remedy these discrepancies.

Data is treasure: new worlds open up to organisations that understand how to scoop useful information out of unstructured data. At the President of ETH Zurich’s "Lokaltermin", researchers and business representatives revealed how data could serve a broad public in future.

President of the Swiss Confederation, Ueli Maurer, is currently testing a crypto phone. ETH News talked to his namesake, ETH professor and cryptography expert Ueli Maurer, about secure IT, the NSA and the threat of a cyberwar.

Hackers claimed last year to have a total of 12 million numbers for iPhone, iPad and iPod devices, along with some other phone numbers and personal data on their owners. During the London 2012 Olympic Games the IT network was hit by cyber attacks every day.