How can we protect sensitive data for times to come?

UT Professor of Information Security, Dominique Unruh will hold his inaugural lecture "Everlasting Security" in University Assembly Hall on October 19th at 4.15 pm. Everyone is most welcome!

Cryptography is a powerful tool for protecting personal data that need to be processed. Cryptographic protocols are, however, only as secure as the underlying encryption schemes. We must face up to the fact that today’s protocols may be broken in the future. It may happen that, if an attacker manages to record encrypted messages by which we have processed sensitive data, and the encryption scheme is then broken at a later date, the attacker will have retrospective access to the data. In relation to highly confidential data such as, e.g., medical records, this is an unacceptable risk.

A way out of this quandary is an encryption protocol dubbed “everlasting security”. An everlasting security protocol guarantees that all data transmitted using the protocol will stay secure, even if at some point in the future all the underlying encryption schemes are broken. Unfortunately, with traditional cryptographic techniques, everlasting security can only be achieved in very limited situations.

In the inaugural lecture, Professor Unruh will explain how everlasting security can be attained in a wide variety of tasks by using quantum cryptography, i.e., by making use of quantum mechanical effects in cryptographic protocols.

Professor Dominique Unruh received his PhD (summa cum laude) from the Department of Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe in 2006.

From 2006 to 2008 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Saarland University, and from 2008 to 2011 as a junior research group leader in the Cluster of Excellence Multimodal Computing and Interaction at the same university. Since March 2011, he is Professor of Information Security at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu.

Professor Unruh’s research focuses on the foundations of cryptography, techniques for verifying the security of cryptographic protocols, and on quantum cryptography.

Dominique Unruh’s professorship at the University of Tartu is supported by the European Social Fund through the DoRa Program Action 2. The aim of the doctoral studies and internationalization program DoRa 2 is to improve the quality of higher education by recruiting academic staff from abroad.

Additional information: Kady Sõstar, public relations specialist, tel. +372 737 5685, e-mail: kady [dot] sostar [ät] ut [dot] ee

Anneli Miljan
UT Press Officer
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