Boris Škorić
Associate professor in the SEC group.

Teaching

Course material for 2IMS10

Research interests

Security with noisy data

An essential property of cryptographic primitives is an extreme sensitivity to small changes in their inputs. However, a number of important security applications use physical measurements as a source of (secret) randomness. On the one hand, these measurements are inherently noisy. On the other hand, we often wish to use them as input for hash functions, block ciphers etc. Some form of error correction is obviously needed if we want reproducible results. This requires storage/transfer of redundancy data. It is prudent to assume that attackers have access to this data. Hence the challenge is to develop efficient error correction methods where the redundancy data does not compromise security. This leads to an interesting mix of physics, information theory, coding theory and cryptography. The techniques developed in this field are useful in the following applications:

Using quantum physics for security

Quantum physics has the interesting property that measurements typically destroy state information, and that unknown quantum information cannot be cloned. The inherent confidentiality and tamper evidence properties allow one to design security protocols that would be impossible with classical physics. The most notable example is Quantum Key Distribution, but there are other nifty tricks:

Collusion-resistant watermarking codes

It is possible to embed hidden data in digital content such as audio and video. This is called watermarking or fingerprinting. In forensic watermarking a content provider embeds a unique identification code into the content for each individual customer, in order to be able to trace any 'leakage' of content (e.g. distribution on P2P) back to the customer. The most powerful attack against forensic watermarks is the so-called collusion attack: multiple attackers collaborate to remove the watermark. As they have bought differently watermarked versions of the same content, they can find the location of a significant part of their watermarks simply by comparing their content. In these locations they have a strong attack. The content provider's defense is to use an error-correcting code for the embedded indentifier. I concentrate on the following questions: This research topic involves information theory, statistics and analysis.
See the webpage of the CREST project.

MSc projects

Some ideas for (internal) master projects.

Publications

List of publications

Presentations

Presentation slides.

Contact information

Boris Škorić
Security of embedded systems (SEC) group
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
tel: 040 247 4870

Visting address:
MF 6.059

Mail address:
Postbus 513
5600 MB Eindhoven

PGP public key