ISSS Award for IT and Information Security presented

The ISSS Excellence Award of Switzerland's largest association of ICT security professionals honors first-class bachelor's, master's and doctoral theses on IT and information security. The award was presented on November 27 in Zurich at an ISSS Security Talk attended by around 80 participants. This year, the award, which is endowed with 8,000 Swiss francs, is shared by a doctoral thesis and a bachelor's thesis:

Damian VizàrEPFL, Faculté Information et Communication, Laboratoire de Sécurité et Cryptographie, for his excellent doctoral thesis "Provably Secure Authenticated Encryption". The original statement of the jury: Authenticated Encryption (AE) is a symmetric key cryptographic primitive that provides for confidentiality and authenticity of processed messages at the same time. While the research of AE started already in 2000, Damian Vizàr presents in his thesis the first provably secure AE scheme based on a compression function, evaluates and discusses various other approaches proposed by other researchers and develops a novel definition for on-line AE-based security. Together with his colleagues he submitted the Offset Merkle-Damgård (OMD) scheme to the international CAESAR competition and made it to the second of three rounds, featuring a total of 57 competitors. The ISSS Excellence Award is attributed to this well written, excellent thesis, which provides a wealth of theoretical and practical insights, and will have a significant academic impact. The amount awarded is CHF 4'000.

Julien Farine and Xavier HennigBern University of Applied Sciences, for her excellent bachelor thesis "Measuring Darknet Vendors Revenue Using Bitcoin Multisig Feature". The original statement of the jury: Blockchains have many potential applications in a digital world. They may replace traditional financial services, revolutionize supply chain management or serve as an enabling technology for novel fundraising schemes. Not surprisingly, blockchain technology has also been adopted by the darknet operators as a means for establishing trust between the vendor of goods, the dark market and the buyer. The "multisig" feature of the Bitcoin architecture will assure that the Bitcoin payment will only be released to the vender when the preceding part of the transaction is complete, confirmed by the market operator's and the buyer's signatures. The authors of this thesis, however, noted that this property can be used to observe the transactions carried out on the dark markets, and to estimate the revenue generated by dark market sales.

Source: ISSS