News
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How to Trust Strangers
Trust is the basis of any distributed, fault-tolerant, or secure system. A trust assumption specifies the failures that a system, such as a blockchain network, can tolerate and determines the conditions under which it operates correctly. In systems subject to Byzantine faults, the trust assumption is usually specified through sets of processes that may fail together. Trust has traditionally been symmetric, such that all processes in the system adhere to the same, global assumption about potential faults. Recently, asymmetric trust models have also been considered, especially in the context of blockchains, where every participant is free to choose who to trust.
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Seminar Civil Law and Computer Science
In the spring term 2021, the Institute for Civil Law and the Institute of Computer Science jointly organized an interdisciplinary seminar with participants from the Faculty of Law and from the Faculty of Science.
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Synchronization power of smart contracts
Our recent research on the synchronization power of smart contracts explores the scalability of blockchain networks.
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Nathalie Steinhauer joins the group
Welcome back, Nathalie Steinhauer! As of April 2021, Nathalie has joined the team as a Ph.D. student. She graduated with a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Bern in early 2020. Her M.Sc. thesis addressed a practical implementation of distributed cryptography and was already carried out at the Cryptology and Data Security research group.
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New interdisciplinary Seminar in Civil Law and Computer Science
The Institute for Civil Law and the Institute of Computer Science will hold an interdisciplinary seminar on the topic of Distributed Trust and Blockchain. Students of computer science and law and will work closely together on questions concerning the blockchain and its potential in the legal domain. The goal of the seminar is to explore how the characteristics of blockchain technology can support the transfer and enforcement of rights.
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No Consensus in the Ripple Network
A technical analysis of Ripple’s protocol reveals that it ensures neither safety nor liveness under the stated assumptions.
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Seminar on Trusted Computing and Secure Protocols
The Cryptology and Data Security Research Group organizes a seminar on Trusted Computing and Secure Protocols, to be held at Uni Bern on September 8, 2020, 10:15-12:00.
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Consensus Beyond Thresholds
Congratulations to Orestis Alpos to the paper on Consensus Beyond Thresholds at SRDS 2020 in September. Due to the pandemic, the conference takes place online and nobody travels to Shanghai, unfortunately.
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Course Overview
After starting teaching in cryptology and data security during 2019 and 2020, we are currently planning the following course offerings.
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Seminar on Privacy and Data Protection
The seminar has been postponed due to the Coronavirus situation
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Christian Cachin elected ACM Fellow
Every year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognizes the top 1% of its members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology.
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Giorgia Azzurra Marson joins the group
In December 2019, Giorgia Azzurra Marson has joined the team as a postdoctoral researcher.
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Jovana Mićić and Alex Pellegrini join the group
At the start of September 2019, Jovana Mićić and Alex Pellegrini have joined the team.
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Swiss Crypto Day in Bern
The first edition of the Swiss Crypto Day takes place on 5 September 2019 and is hosted by the crypto group at the University of Bern. It is an informal event to promote research in cryptology in Switzerland and will take place at irregular intervals.
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Ignacio Amores Sesar joins the team
As the third Ph.D. student in the group Ignacio Amores Sesar joins the team. Originally from Spain, he has a background in mathematics and most recently completed his M.Sc. at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Welcome!
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Trusted Computing meets Blockchain - Paper at SRDS 2019
Our paper Trusted Computing meets Blockchain: Rollback Attacks and a Solution for Hyperledger Fabric describes how to run smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric within an Intel SGX trusted execution environment. It will appear at IEEE SRDS 2019 in Lyon this October. You’ll find the code on github in a Hyperledger Lab.
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Crypto@Bern blog
Started a new blog: Crypto@Bern
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Orestis Alpos joins the team
Welcome Orestis Alpos! He joins from Greece, where he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at NTUA and graduated with a thesis topic linking computer security with machine learning.
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Luca Zanolini joins the team
Welcome Luca Zanolini! He has a degree in mathematics and joins the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group this month from a blockchain startup.
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Website goes live
The website of the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group is live at crypto.unibe.ch, thanks to Jekyll, SCSS, and git.
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