Security Applications

The contemporary evolution of information technology is making our widespread world to one society. Unfortunately, the members of this society do not have all the same rights and are not all good natured and harmless. Therfore this society must be subject to a set of rules to guarantee individual rights.

While enforcing these rules the information technology comes into play again, but this time adversarial: better technology facilitates it for adversaries to break the rules easier and makes the task of the lawgiver more complex. To counter these problems, strong cryptography is one possibility. But the more difficult the adversary's task has to be made, the more complex the secret must be and accordingly the longer the calculations take for the communication partners. Thus, for more security more efficient methods would be very beneficial.

For some years now, our institute is dealing among other things with questions of more efficient security. In this context we do not limit ourself to faster hardware security solutions, but are also adressing more efficient methods for secure Mobile and E-Commerce.

At the moment four projects are running:

1. Efficient HW-architecture for group rekeying in multicast security:
   Multicast is an efficient mechnism for group communication on the Internet. The Application of multicast needs dedicated netwerk infrastructure and special protocols and algorithms. Combining these requirements with those of security enforcement a more challenging issue arises for secure multicast. One of the important and difficult problems in secure multicast ist the change and distribution of communication keys according to the dynamic change of the group membership. Within the scope of this project a Rekeying Processor is designed and implemented to cope with the rekeying problem.
   
2. Watermarking techniques for distributed computing:
   Most of the embedded systems working in distributed environments are low-end devices in terms of their computing power, memory size, and communication bandwidths. New security mechanisms using digital watermarking techniques are proposed, which rely on authentication rather than on encryption methods.
3. Watermarked multimedia data behaviour over lossy channels:
   This project is taking one step further the watermarking approach for mobile security. It studies the behaviour of the multimedia data flows being affected by the watermarking techniques in different channel models so that the approach can be applied in real mobile environments.
4. Dedicated hardware modules for high-speed cryptography:
   The Goal of this project is it to find more effiecient hardware solutions (and algorithms) for cryptograhic calculations. It is part of the SicAri-project, in which a framework for secure use of internet applications is developed. Thus, a special focus is laid on secure ubiquitious computation.