The Department of Computing Science at Umeå University is now seeking 1-2 PhD Students with a focus on Cryptography and Cybersecurity.
The department is internationally renowned for its excellent research and education. We are affiliated with WASP – Sweden’s largest individual research program of all time, coordinate its sister program WASP-HS, which focuses on the consequences of emerging technologies, and are a strong partner in the national strategic research program eSSENCE. We value diversity and actively work to promote an inclusive work environment with a high level of engagement.
Read more at: Department of Computing Science
Project description
The project focuses on the design and analysis of modes of operation for symmetric-key cryptography, including, but not limited to, message authentication codes, pseudorandom functions, encryption schemes, deck functions, hash functions, and hash-based signatures, for applications such as quantum-secure and post-quantum cryptography, and leakage- and tamper-resilient cryptography. It is supervised by Asst. Prof. Mustafa Khairallah. The research is expected to include a mixture of theory and practice. The selected students will be part of the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University, as well as the WASP graduate school.
Possible research directions may be on:
1) the design and analysis of variable-length leakage-resilient encryption schemes, with a focus on stream ciphers and wide-block ciphers (Accordion modes).
2) a theoretical analysis of emerging modes of operation and emerging threat models.
3) studying the security notions, attacks, and proofs for hash-based signatures, with a focus on physical attacks.