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cosec >students >Teaching >Summer 2011  

Esecurity: secure internet & e-passports

Corresponding entry in Aachen Campus, Bonn Basis.

Responsible

Prof. Dr. Joachim von zur Gathen

Lecture

Michael Nüsken

Tutorial

Raoul Blankertz

Time & Place

First meeting: Tuesday, 05 April 2011 at 1330, b-it Rheinsaal.

All times subject to agreement in class.

Exam

Exam: 5 August 2011, 1400-1700, b-it Rheinsaal.

Post-exam meeting: 12 August 2011, 1400, b-it cosec seminar room 1.25.

2nd exam (repetitions only): 5 Oktober 2011, 1400-1700, room 2.1.

2nd Post-exam meeting: 7 Oktober 2011, 1500, b-it cosec seminar room 1.25.

Notes

The screen notes (PDF 116MB) contain all handwritten stuff (last updated 13 July 2011, 18:35).

Exercises

Files

text1.enc

text2.enc

studID.enc

Allocation

4+2 SWS, 8 credits. Optionally, 3+2 SWS, 6 credits.

Successful completion of the course yields 8 credit points. For students who only want 6 credit points, a breakpoint at about 3/4 of the teaching time will be defined, and only the course material up to that point will be relevant for their exams and grades.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge in cryptography is needed, as for example the course Cryptography held in the previous winter. Compare our programme.

Contents

This course is about various aspects of security in the internet. In the first part we deal with secure connections, whereas the second part considers electronic voting schemes involving further tasks.

In the internet a large variety of protocols ("chatting programs") are in use to make this or that `secure'. VPN, IPsec, SSL, PKI, PGP are just a few tokens that need explanations. We will try to understand a little of that and how things are used and made available.

Passports shall carry more and more sensitive information in a easily accessible way in the future. This information may, apart from name, origin and the like, contain fingerprints or retina scans. And it is stored in electronic form, and it can be accessed by wireless transmissions. This raises a lot of new problems:

The course will try to give an overview what and how things are implemented. We will discuss the concerns of and threats to holders, society and government. Biometrical information has long been used to identify persons. Already, in 1901 Scotland Yard started to use fingerprints to identify criminals. Since then various other methods have been introduced: iris scan, face recognition, retina scans, hand geometry to name just the most prominent. Since about 1965 people have tried to automate all these identification methods. This has shown many difficulties. It is still not clear which information identify a person: for example, though it is widely believed that fingerprints do, only few scientific studies are available. And it turns out to be pretty difficult to find a reliable automatic pattern matcher. Mind that it is not like searching a given fixed string in a dictionary. You have to find the template(s) that are most similar to a given one, or tell that there is none within given bounds.

Literature

Mailinglist

We will put each member on the mailing list

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. You can also subscribe yourself. The list is intented for all participants of the course as a platform for discussions around the topic. Furthermore, announcements regarding the course are made here.

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