Radboud Digital Security group Lunch Talk homepage

Welcome to the site of the talks organised by Radboud Digital Security group. We organize a talk every Wednesday at 12:30.

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Upcoming talks

  • Wednesday, 7th of May 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by Solane El Hirch

    Tearing Solutions for Tree Traversal in Stateful Hash-based Cryptography

    Stateful hash-based signature schemes are a family of post-quantum signature schemes.
    XMSS and LMS, two digital signature schemes standardized by NIST, belong to this family.
    Both are structured as a collection of one-time signature key pairs, which are combined using Merkle binary tree.
    They rely on tree traversal algorithms to optimize time versus memory efficiency, reducing the signing time of the schemes at the cost of managing a larger amount of auxiliary data (i.e, state).
    In this paper, we focus on XMSS with the BDS algorithm when used in a practical setting on an embedded device.
    One challenge on such devices is that they can experience a loss of power unexpectedly.
    For instance, an NFC chip might be torn away from its power source In the case of such a tearing event, the validity of the state can be impacted: the algorithm does not update the state correctly if such an event occurs.
    We propose an algorithm based on BDS that we call BDSFix.
    This algorithm recovers the BDS state following a tearing event.
    Our algorithm either equals (for a single tearing event) or outperforms recovering the state through BDS for any number of tearings larger than 1.
    This ranges from a 9% speed-up for six subsequent tearing events to improvements by factors of up to 8 for a large number of tearing events.

  • Wednesday, 14th of May 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by Joan Daemen

    TBA

  • Wednesday, 21st of May 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by Vianney Lapotre

    TBA

  • Wednesday, 28th of May 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by TBA

    TBA

  • Wednesday, 4th of June 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by Jan Schoone

    TBA

  • Wednesday, 11th of June 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by TBA

    TBA

  • Friday, 20th of June 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by Sengim Karayalcin

    It's Not Just a Phase: On Investigating Phase Transitions in Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

    Side-channel analysis (SCA) represents a realistic threat where the attacker can observe unintentional information to obtain secret data.
    Evaluation labs also use the same SCA techniques in the security certification process.
    The results in the last decade have shown that machine learning, especially deep learning, is an extremely powerful SCA approach, allowing the breaking of protected devices while achieving optimal attack performance.
    Unfortunately, deep learning operates as a black-box, making it less useful for security evaluators who must understand how attacks work to prevent them in the future.
    This work demonstrates that mechanistic interpretability can effectively scale to realistic scenarios where relevant information is sparse and well-defined interchange interventions to the input are impossible due to side-channel protections.
    Concretely, we reverse engineer the features the network learns during phase transitions, eventually retrieving secret masks, allowing us to move from black-box to white-box evaluation.

  • Wednesday, 25th of June 2025 at 12:30 in the big lecture room in Mercator 1 (MERC1_00.28, ground floor)
    DiS Lunch by TBA

    TBA

  • Past talks