SBA will offer an ERCIM fellowship (co-financed by the EU project “ABCDE”) to Dimitris Simos

Today our scientific board met to review past research and discuss further research directions.

Kai Zhang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US Department of Energy),

Topic: Matrix approximation.

Nov 28, 3pm, SBA

Title: Large Scale Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract

Clustering is a fundamental data explorative step in pattern recognition and machine learning. This talk involves two types of clustering paradigms, the mixture models and graph-based clustering methods, with the primary focus on how to improve the scaling behavior of related algorithms for large-scale application. The first part is on simplifying mixture models, and the second part is on applying low-rank matrix approximation with novel sampling scheme in a large family of mainstream learning algorithms. Topics on community detection and large scale supervised learning (SVM) will also be included.

Edgar Weippl im Interview mit den Niederösterr. Nachrichten (Extrabeilage Sicher Leben)

“Wir haben die Cloud Lösung von A1 einer Architektur-Analyse unterzogen und können hiermit bestätigen, dass die Daten in der A1 Austria Cloud nur auf Servern gespeichert werden, die in Österreich betrieben werden”, bestätigt Markus Klemen, Geschäftsführer von Secure Business Austria Research. (mehr…)

Lorenz Zechner and Peter Kieseberg organize the INMOTOS Workshop.

“Oft sind es erstaunlich simple Sicherheitslücken, die im Internet für Datenklau-Attacken ausgenützt werden.” (Gastkommentar Edgar Weippl, Wiener Zeitung)

Manuel Leithner’s book review was just published (DOI)

New Scientist: Markus Huber has developed software to help police use online clues to solve offline crimes

Manuel Leitner is holding a lesson about UCC Privacy & Security in cooperation with CON.ECT. The talk is centered on multidimensional communication including audio, video, text and files. Threats endangering the privacy of the transmitted data are shown and defense strategies are presented in this talk.  ( mehr… )

Our paper has been accepted: Social Network Forensics: Tapping the Data Pool of Social Networks.

Internetsicherheit, Hacker und Datenschutz

Der weltweite freie Datenverkehr hat auch seine Schattenseiten: Unbekümmerte Internetuser gehen viel zu unvorsichtig mit ihren Daten um, wichtige Webseiten weisen oft ernste Schwachstellen auf, Hacker finden immer wieder neue Methoden, in Computersysteme einzudringen. Edgar Weippl (Institut für Softwaretechnik und Interaktive Systeme, TU Wien, sba-research), Christian Platzer und Gilbert Wondracek (Seclab, Institut für Rechnergestützte Automation, TU Wien) werden mögliche Gefahren aufzeigen, über Methoden von Hackern erzählen und gemeinsam diskutieren, ob es überhaupt jemals ein „sicheres“ Internet geben kann. (Termin, TU forum)

A Bird’s-Eye View of Optimal Codes and Symmetric Cryptography from Combinatorial Designs

Dimitris E. Simos, Department of Mathematics, National Technical University of Athens,

 Abstract: In the past few decades, combinatorial design theory has grown to encompass a wider variety of investigations, many of which are not apparently motivated by any practical application. Rather, they are motivated by a desire to obtain a coherent and powerful theory of existence and properties of designs. Nevertheless, it comes as no surprise that applications in coding theory and communications continue to arise, and also that designs have found applications in new areas. Cryptography in particular has provided a new source of applications of designs in computer science, and simultaneously a field of new and challenging problems in design theory.

In this lecture, we present a number of applications of combinatorial designs in which the connection with classes of optimal codes and modern symmetric (private-key) cryptography appears to be substantial and meaningful. In the first part, we present some new results for self-dual codes and quasi-cyclic codes and exemplify some of their advantages in terms of encoding and decoding. In the continuum, we survey recent powerful private-key cryptosystems from special classes of combinatorial designs, that posses beautiful combinatorial properties. Practical aspects of the cryptosystems, in terms of security and cryptanalysis are analyzed and examples of real-time encryption and decryption are provided using cryptographic algorithms. We conclude, by providing a state-of-the-art comparison of private-key block ciphers in the field of modern cryptography.

Edgar Weippl is elected as vice president and will continue organizing the ECRIM fellowship program for Austria.

IT-SeCX 11.11.11: Markus Huber presents “Social Snapshots – Digitale Forensik für Soziale Netzwerke” at ITSeCX (more…)

Ulrich Bayer did hold a lesson on secure development of web applications at the “IKT-Zentren Akademie” of 2011. The talk included a theoretical and practical introduction to secure web application development and the most common attack vectors. (mehr…)