Cryptology (in french)

C'est à l'initiative du groupe « Algèbre, Théorie des Nombres et Calcul Formel » que la Faculté des Sciences Semlalia de Marrakech organise un séminaire de formation sur la cryptologie. Cette science a pour objet la conception et l'analyse des mécanismes permettant d'assurer l'intégrité, l'authenticité et la confidentialité des données et des communications. Dans ce séminaire, deux spécialistes Fabien LAGUILLAUMIE (laboratoire GREYC, Caen) et Damien VERGNAUD (laboratoire de International Center for Information Technology, Bonn-Aachen) vont nous introduire les concepts de base de la cryptologie contemporaine. Leurs interventions s'articuleront autour de trois axes :
  • Principes de la sécurité réductionniste (ou sécurité prouvée) appliqués aux primitives de chiffrement et de signature ;
  • Etude algorithmique du problème du logarithme discret (avec notamment la présentation d'algorithmes de résolution et d'une borne inférieure de complexité dans un modèle spécifique) ;
  • Utilisation des applications bilinéaires pour construire de nouveaux cryptosystèmes et leur implantation concrète à partir des couplages de Weil et de Tate sur les courbes elliptiques
La dernière journée de ce séminaire sera consacrée à la présentation de certains travaux de recherche autour de ce thème. top

Securing e-commerce

Internet has opened a new field of commerce to both producers and consumers. The advertisement and distribution of products and services can go beyond geographical limits with small cost overheads. Consumers can also enjoy the worldwide availability of services and select the best quality and price without worrying about physical distribution of sources. The technology of doing electronic business either for business to business or for business to consumer are called e-commerce and is a large area of research covering different areas like data security, databases, networking, and etc. This course studies a particularly challenging aspects of e-commerce, namely security. Although both producers and consumers are enjoying the advantages of e-commerce, this new technology has confronted them with new security risks like:
  • How to be sure only privileged persons are getting information about a transaction.
  • How to be sure that the receiver of payment is the real service provider.
  • How to avoid denial of an order after the service has been shipped.
In this course you will learn more about the security of e-commerce and find some solutions to its problems. top

Provable security in asymmetric cryptography

Provable Security is an important research area in cryptography. Cryptographic primitives or protocols without a rigorous proof cannot be regarded as secure in practice. There are many schemes that are originally thought as secure being successfully cryptanalyzed, which clearly indicates the need of formal security assurance. With provable security, we are confident in using cryptographic applications to replace the traditional way in physical world. Unfortunately, schemes with provable security sometimes give only theoretical feasibility rather than a practical construction, and correctness of the proofs may be difficult to verify.

This course will start from scratch (basic material, typical challenges, problem formulation) and will give an overview on the methods and the pitfalls of applying reductionnist security for signature and encryption schemes.

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Steganography and Digital Watermarking

Steganography deals with hiding information into covert channels in order to conceal messages. It is in this way a supplement (not a replacement) to encryption since it aims at preventing information from being seen and not from being understood. While steganography focusses on the message to be hidden, watermarking has its focus on the covert channel. In fact, watermarking is a branch of information hiding that originated from the need for copyright protection of digital media; it intends to hide information about the medium, the watermark, into the medium in order to prove its ownership.

The course gives an overview of the most popular information hiding techniques/systems in the research community or industry. It presents furthermore attacks on these systems as well as methods to countermeasure these attacks.

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Seminar Security for Ad-Hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are networks that do not have an underlying fixed infrastructure. Mobile hosts "join" in, on the fly, and create a network on their own. This is in contrast to older network technologies in which some designated nodes, usually with custom hardware (routers, switches, hubs, firewalls, ...) perform the task of forwarding the data. Minimal configuration and quick deployment make ad hoc networks suitable for emergency situations like natural or human-induced disasters, military conflicts, emergency medical situations etc. With the network topology changing dynamically and the lack of a centralized network management functionality, these networks tend to be vulnerable to a number of attacks. There is a need to devise security solutions to prevent attacks that jeopardize the secure network operation.

This seminar aims to provide a state-of-the-art view of security in wireless ad hoc networks.

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