International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We are looking for an excellent PhD candidate to work in the area of information and communication security with a focus on authentication problems in constrained settings. This is particularly important for applications involving mobile phones, wireless communication and RFID systems, which suffer from restrictions in terms of power resources, network connectivity, computational capabilities, as well as potential privacy issues. The overall aim of the project will be to develop nearly optimal algorithms for achieving security and privacy while minimising resource use.

More concretely, part of the research will involve the analysis and development of authentication protocols in specific settings. This will include investigating resistance of both existing and novel protocols against different types of attacks, theoretically and experimentally. In addition to investigating established settings, such as RFID authentication, the research will also explore more general authentication problems, such as those that arise in the context of trust in social networks, smartphone applications and collaborative data processing. This will be done by grounding the work in a generalised decision-making framework. The project should result in the development of theory and authentication mechanisms for noisy, constrained settings that strike an optimal balance between reliable authentication, privacy-preservation and resource consumption. Some previous research related to this research project can be found here: http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/~katerina/Publications.html

Qualifications

Applicants for the position shall have a Master’s Degree or corresponding in Computer Science, Informatics, Telecommunications, Information Security and Cryptography or in a related discipline. A master\\\'s degree in information security and cryptography is a bonus.

Experience in one or more of cryptography, probability and statistics, decision and game theory are ben