Comprehensive Cryptography Group

The Comprehensive Cryptography Group focuses on the intersection of theoretical and practical research.

Cryptographic Research

Cryptographic security notions establish security guarantees in a strict mathematical way and can be used to analyze the security of cryptographic protocols. However, established security notions make many idealized assumptions, which often do hot hold in practice. One focus of this group is thus to develop security notions and models that capture existing systems more faithfully, closing the gap between model and reality.

This avenue of research is complemented by developing appropriate protocols and architectures for which security can then be proven in our new models.

In order to achieve solutions with both strong formal and real-world security guarantees as well as practical efficiency, secure hardware building blocks are among our main tools.

When concrete practical applications are concerned, we work together with legal experts and scholars to document or research legal compliance.

Holistic Security Analyses

The core cryptographic research is complemented by research on holistic security analyses.

Real-world systems cannot be formally described due to their complexity. As a consequence, security proofs are not possible anymore - instead, less formal security analyses are performed. We research on how we can combine existing methods for security analyses, e.g. attack trees, in a formally justified and reusable way, while keeping the security guarantees that can be formally established. In particular, these holistic security analyses will focus on assumptions made in proofs and formal security models and incorporate them in the less formal analysis.

We will use our holistic security analyses as a foundation for the quantification of security of real-world systems.