Description: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently, and much of this is facilitated by cybercrime. I will use this example to explore cybercrime in more depth, and understand its real-world impacts.  I will explore the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews with industry and law enforcement, and an analysis of an online blackmarket. Tickets are purchased by complicit travellers or resellers from the online blackmarket. Victim travellers obtain tickets from fake travel…

Description: Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are the most widely publicized applications of cryptography today. Using the example of Bitcoin, we will aim to understand the cryptographic building blocks of cryptocurrencies and how they fit together to enable a distributed payment system. We will then explore why newer cryptocurrencies built on Bitcoin employ more advanced cryptography. In particular we will examine the contentious issue of anonymous payments. Finally we will discuss the concept of smart contracts, how they can be achieved using blockchains,…

Description: Standardization of the first phase of the next generation of cellular networks has almost concluded now, and the roll out of these 5G networks is coming soon. This talk will focus on the security of 3GPP 5G network standards. It will give an understanding of how standardization works, what was standardized for security and try to shed some light to why some things are the way they are. About the speaker: Alf Zugenmaier is professor for mobile networks and security at…

Secure Systems Demo Day is organized annually to showcase our work during the previous 12-month period. Demo Day 2019 will be held on May 29. This event is part of Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security (HAIC) public outreach program and jointly organized by the Secure Systems Group at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The event is intended to bring local academia and industry together and give them an overview of information security research going on in Finland’s capital area. The event is an excellent opportunity…

Description: Can we trust the results of security research? Are most published research findings false? How can we improve security research? We will discuss these topics in the context of our recent work. We will show flaws in reporting that we discovered in top security research venues. We will discuss how to avoid these kinds of flaws and how to improve your general understanding of security research. We will also discuss why security research needs predictive logical models. More information available…

The HAIC public outreach initiative aims to make information security more accessible to a broader audience. Part of this initiative, are organizing HAIC Talks, a series of public lectures on contemporary topics in information security. In the style of studia generalia, these lectures are free and open to everyone. No background knowledge in information security is required. Speaker: Prof. Kenneth Paterson, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Lecture description: Quantum computing represents a new computing paradigm that directly exploits the laws of physics to perform “interesting” computations. In particular, if…