Meta-Proseminar

CISPA Meta-Proseminar

This virtual proseminar is used to distribute students among the available actual proseminars. To register for any of the other proseminars that are offered by CISPA, you have to you register for this meta proseminar. You can select up to three proseminars you would like to take, and will then be automatically assigned to one of them on April 10th.

Please note the following:

• We aim to provide a fair mapping that respects your wishes, but at the same time also respects the preferences of your fellow students.

• Experience has shown that particular proseminars are more popular than others, yet these proseminars cannot fit all students. We thus encourage students to select their preferences for all available seminars, which eases the process to assign students that do not fit the overly popular seminars to another, less crowded one. Each student must therefore give at least two neutral (“OK”) or positive (“Good”) preferences.

• If you are really dedicated to one particular proseminar, and you do not want any other proseminar, please select the "No seminar" as second positive option. However, this may ultimately lead to the situation that you are not assigned to any proseminar. Also, choosing "No seminar" as second option does not increase your chances of getting your first choice. In fact, it increases the chances that you will be assigned to any CISPA proseminar.

The assignment will be automatically performed by a CMS-internal constraint solver on April, 10th, 2018. You will be added to the respective proseminars automatically and be notified about this shortly thereafter. To ease your planning, the kickoff events of all proseminars are scheduled for April, 11th, 12:00-14:00, so you can already enter this date in your calendar. 

If you also applied for a non-CISPA proseminar (e.g., with other chairs in the CS department) and want to take their proseminar instead of the one you have been assigned by us, please let us know ASAP, but latest by Friday, April 13th. Missing to do so may harm other students that want to take the seminar slot that you occupy and do not use. Naturally, neither your fellow students nor we will appreciate this.

 

This term's proseminars

Formal Verification of Security Protocols (Finkbeiner, Jacobs)

Security protocols are omnipresent in our daily lives in areas such as online banking and mobile phones. Their purpose is to keep our transactions and personal data secure. Because these protocols are implemented on potentially insecure networks like the internet, they are notoriously difficult to devise. The field of formal analysis of security protocols has seen significant advances during the last years. There is now a better understanding of decidability and complexity questions, and models with solid theoretical foundations have been developed together with proof techniques. Automated tools based on these insights have been designed and successfully applied to numerous protocols, including industrial protocols. In this Proseminar, we will look at the recent and ongoing work in this very active field of research.

Hacking (Stock, Bugiel, Nürnberger, Sorge)

Goal of this Proseminar is to give students a deeper understanding of the typical security problems and weaknesses that pervade all kinds of IT systems today. To provide a more solid understanding of the discussed attack techniques, this seminar strongly mixes theoretical and practical aspects. On the one hand, participants are conveyed the typical Proseminar learning contents (e.g., presentation techniques, etc.). On the other hand, the participants are required to also learn and apply established tools for exploiting and attacking IT systems in the context of capture-the-flag styled exercises. For further information, see https://swag.cispa.saarland/teaching.html

Privacy by Design (Sorge)

The proseminar serves as an introduction to privacy by design in different applications. Besides overarching topics (like measuring anonymity or privacy in databases), we will also deal with application-specific privacy measures. These include, among others, passports/identity cards, virtual currencies, and electricity metering. Participants will learn about anonymity, pseudonymity, and examples of breaking them.

Selected Topics of Mobile Security (Bugiel)

In this proseminar, the participants will learn at the example of selected topics from the area of mobile security how to find, summarise, present, and discuss relevant scientific papers. The focus of the selected papers lies on Android, given its high popularity among researchers. The topics include usability aspects of Android's permission system and security-relevant APIs, security extensions at different levels of Android's software stack, app analysis, and newly identified attack vectors.