This year’s Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy took place in Šibenik, Croatia  June 13–17, 2022. The summer school was jointly organised by the Digital Security (DiS) group, Radboud University (The Netherlands), Max-Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (Germany), ETH Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (Switzerland) and Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb (Croatia). We talked to school organisers and participants who shared their experiences on the Summer school and the CONCORDIA partnership.

Stjepan Picek, Radboud University, The Netherlands – member of the organising committee

Radboud is one of the members of the CONCORDIA stakeholder group and it recognizes the importance of educational/training activities, for which the successful partnership with CONCORDIA is essential. While the school is active from 2014 (with the exception off covid 19 years), every year we strive to provide better experience to the participants. To this end, CONCORDIA allowed us better exposure to students in the domain of security and organized a forum to discuss the relevance of networking. On the second day of this year’s Summer School CONCORDIA project was presented to the school participants.

Ante Derek, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia

FER has been the organiser of the school since its inception and now that FER is a full part of the CONCORDIA project, we are glad that this partnership was extended to the Summer school. Through the partnership we are able to support participation of our graduate students at the Summer school and expose them to cutting edge research in the fields of cryptography and security in general.

Petar Paradžik, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb

After two years of postponement due to Covid-19, we have finally witnessed the 7th edition of Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy in Šibenik. This year, leading security researchers from various relevant fields gathered again, and each PhD student was able to find a talk that was closely related to their research topic. Topics included elliptic curve-based cryptography, symbolic analysis of security protocols, web-based privacy, post-quantum key exchange protocols, secure end-to-end messaging, secure machine learning, trusted execution environments, microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks, hardware trojans, Wi-Fi attacks, and security of low-end IoT devices. The most notable talks for me were the following.

Analysing Payment Protocols with Tamarin by David Basin, in which he talks about bypassing the PIN in non-Visa cards by using them for Visa transactions (check out the paper of the same name). This talk (and the paper) also demonstrated that symbolic protocol verification tools like Tamarin Prover are mature enough to be able to find novel attacks in a semi-automated manner.

Secure Messaging: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Kenny Paterson. I knew Signal was good, but I didn’t know that It should be a role model for others. I also knew Telegram was bad, but I didn’t know it was ugly. Telegram had a vulnerability where an attacker could manipulate the order of client messages in a sequence so that the resulting assembled message was interpreted differently by a server.

Countermeasures for Spectre – Promise and Reality by Yuval Yarom. How do all these Linux patches mitigate microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks targeting modern CPUs that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculative execution? Are they effective enough and how much of an impact do they have on performance? You could hear all about it and much more in this talk.

In addition to the standard lectures seven tutorials were held. These were particularly useful for the PhD students, as they were able to learn, among other things, how to use tools relevant to security research. One of these tools is a symbolic protocol verification tool called Tamarin Prover. The Tamarin Prover tutorial was the longest and lasted six hours. It was given by Professor Cas Cramers, one of the developers of the tool and a well-known researcher in the field.

Hedwig Körfgen, University of the Bundeswehr Munich

The first time after starting my PhD, I got the opportunity to join a summer school. Sibenik was recommended by my colleagues at Bundeswehr university Munich as world-class school with interesting speakers. Additionally, I had heard a lot about the great location. Working in the field of quantum cryptography with a background in physics, I wanted to get as much insights from other areas as possible. And my expectations were even exceeded!

The broad range of topics was very beneficial to get a broader picture of security, privacy and cryptography. I loved especially the combination of talks and hands-on tutorials. My key learnings are:

Formal verification of cryptographic protocols is important and elaborated tools are available. I had never given a thought about everyday credit card payments. I just assumed that the payment providers were aware of security issues. David Basin (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) gave a talk how to use the Tamarin prover to find security issues in payment protocols. The tutorial about Tamarin provided a hands on experience. Thanks to the summer school, I always think about verification when discussing new protocols in my work.

There is much more discussion about Hardware trojans than real-world experiences. In today’s global supply chain, the chips in a device have made a long journey from design to production. The possibility that some malevolent party changed the chips in the process is always somehow suggested in discussion if suppliers from certain countries can be trusted. Christof Paar (MPI Bochum, Germany) busted in his talk “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hardware Trojans” the myth of the omnipresent hardware trojans. The matching tutorial “Hardware Reverse Engineering” provided some exercises how reverse engineering of chips can be used to look for Hardware trojans.

Isogeny-based cryptography is like walking in Manhattan. Chloe Martindale (University of Bristol, UK) presented recent developments in the field of post-quantum cryptography. I will keep the Manhattan map in my mind as great visualization of graph walking.

My overall fazit: Five stars. This was my first summer school and I really enjoyed the atmosphere. I met many like-minded people from all over Europe and had great discussions about our research topics. The discussions with other PhD students as well as experienced researchers were very constructive and interesting. And I am sure, wherever I will attend another summer school or conference, I will meet friends from Real World Crypto and Privacy 2022.

(By FER)

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CyberSec4Europe, CONCORDIA, ECHO and SPARTA are pleased to announce CONVERGENCE NEXT. It follows in the tradition set in the first CONVERGENCE event on 9-11 December 2020 which successfully presented results and demonstrations from the four pilot projects and the collaborative focus groups.  

CONVERGENCE NEXT will focus upon the future of the community, the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC) and look at the key issues for cybersecurity in the future.  This event is not to be missed if you are interested in European cybersecurity issues.  High-level representatives from EU institutions will discuss the role of the ECCC and that of the wide stakeholder community in the next stages. 

More information here!

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When: 26th and 27th October 2022

CONCORDIA Open Door (COD) is an opportunity

• stakeholders of all backgrounds (such as IT, entrepreneurship, education, economy, and policy) can discuss societal and technological needs in the cybersecurity field
• participants can discover others’ competencies for potential collaboration with more than 100 partners (universities, industries, and public bodies)

More info here

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This webinar is the fourth of the Diversity & Cybersecurity Webinar series, provided by CONCORDIA on topics related to gender balance.

Women in Cybersecurity Industry

The demand for cyber specialists and experts is greater than the supply, making society and organizations increasingly vulnerable. For Cyber industries, recruiting cyber talents has become a real challenge. However, women still represent an underexploited source for Cyber Industry. From a social standpoint, Industrials cannot bear that the cyber sector, whose impacts on our daily lives are increasing, to be thought, developed, and governed only by men.

The webinar aims to discuss how to tackle this critical challenge with outstanding speakers. It also aims at facilitating networking among women potentially interested in starting a new career path. For this reason, webinar includes a mentoring activity, implemented as private-calls among the audience and speakers.

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The webinar “EU cybersecurity start-ups today and tomorrow” will take place on March 10th, 2022, Online.

For more information check here

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(by Gabi Dreo)

Three years ago, we started with 42 partners, funded by the EU, and enlarged since then the consortium now to 56 official partners, with 14 partners bringing their own, self-funded resources to contribute to CONCORDIA’s mission of building the European secure, resilient and trusted cybersecurity ecosystem.

The consortium has presented an enormous number of diverse achievements and highlights from research, industry developments (e.g., CONCORDIA Platform for Cyber Threat Intelligence, DDoS Clearing House for Europe), education (e.g., building the European Education Ecosystem for Cybersecurity), economics, legal, women for cybersecurity, startups, stakeholders, cyber ranges, roadmaps, standardization and dissemination. Not to forget to mention Kypo Cyber Range winning a #prize in the category disruptive technology of the EC Innovation Radar were mentioned as well. So follow us closely, because the final year of CONCORDIA will rock!

#CONCORDIARocks

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The format of the school will be blended, so strong preference for physical attendance for which the Green Pass is mandatory, but online participation is also offered. The plan is to have all speakers attending in presence. If conditions, due to Covid-19 restrictions, will make our original plan impossible, we will switch to a complete online format.

The European Network for Cybersecurity (NeCS) PhD School was launched five years ago, in response to the increase need of highly qualified experts in cyber-security. The School addresses the issues of training and development of talented junior researchers as indicated in the European Cybersecurity strategy and highlighted in the EC’s Digital Agenda.

This year the School is supported by the four most important EU initiatives in this area: the Cybersecurity Competence Networks. They have been launched in 2019, within the H2020 framework, and include, CONCORDIA, CyberSec4Europe, ECHO and SPARTA. All of them, put emphasis on the crucial role of education for cybersecurity, proposing new educational and training programmes and new methods of teaching.

The NeCS PhD School is an opportunity for the four pilots to presents to young researchers, and most importantly, to put in practice selected innovation and results. Scope of the NECS PhD Winter School is to present advances on both attacks and defenses in the realm of cybersecurity. In this year programme, compared to previous editions, a good part of the lectures is dedicated to hands-on experiences and exercises, such that students can put in practice the theoretical principles and lessons learned during the more classical lectures.

More here!

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The Workshop will respond to important questions to address one of the most important challenges to improve Cybersecurity in the Organizations: “Threat Intelligence and Information Sharing”.

• Why Threat Intelligence and Information sharing is key to improve European resilience against Cyberattacks?
• How can enhance Incident and response in general for any sector, but specially in the Financial Sector?
• How to start, what are the different options?

More information here!

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CONCORDIA Open Door (COD) is an opportunity

• stakeholders of all backgrounds (such as IT, entrepreneurship, education, economy, and policy) can discuss societal and technological needs in the cybersecurity field
• participants can discover others’ competencies for potential collaboration with more than 100 partners (universities, industries, and public bodies)

COD2021 will apply a virtual model: a live stream will be available online through the event platform.

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The CODE Conference 2021 will be dedicated to the guiding theme of “Supply Chain Sovereignty: Reality or Illusion?” and will be influenced by the global impact of the Covid 19 pandemic. Currently, a hybrid event is planned, with the option to switch completely to a virtual event if needed. More info here

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