[HGI-News] Yvo Desmedt on Monday, November 10

[hgi-news at lists.ruhr-uni-bochum.de]

Dear all,
as announced before, today Prof. Yvo Desmedt will give a talk on
"security analysis of the UCLA Watermarking Schemes" in our seminar
series. As always, everybody is welcome. The talk will take place in
the IC ("Elektrotechnik") building, room IC 4/39 at 13:15.

Regards

Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi



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                      Yvo Desmedt

             Florida State University, USA

          Montag, November 10, 13:15 Uhr, IC 4/39

  Cryptanalysis of Several of the UCLA Watermarking Schemes for  
 Intellectual Property Protection of Digital Circuits/Designs


ABSTRACT:

We analyze four recently proposed watermarking schemes for intellectual 
property protection of digital designs. The first scheme watermarks 
solutions of a hard optimization problem, namely the graph coloring 
problem. The remaining three schemes belong to a family of techniques 
for watermarking digital circuits on programmable hardware. They were
referred to as 
constraint-based watermarking. All of these schemes are different from 
usual image and audio watermarking in that they must maintain the
correctness
of the watermarked objects. Therefore their watermarks cannot be
embedded in
the form of small errors as usually done in audio and visual
watermarking.
Though similar constraint-based schemes existed for watermarking
software,
these schemes are the first ones applied to protect hardware designs. 

In this lecture, we apply a novel method to break the first of these
schemes. 
We show how to modify a watermarked object in such a way that every
signature strings
can be extracted from it. Thus anyone can claim ownership of the object,
yet leave
no traces of who leaked the object.  According to our best knowledge,
this 
method is new and it may be of its own interest. In the other three
watermarking schemes, we show how to locate and to remove the watermark
embedded in
the object, without knowing the secret key used in the embedding.

This presentation is based on joint work with Tri V. Le. 
========================================================================

BIOGRAPHIE:
Yvo Desmedt received his Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude) from the University of 
Leuven, Belgium (1984). He is presently a professor at Florida State 
University (Computer Science) and a visiting professor of Information 
Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. His interests include 
cryptography, network security and computer security. He has authored 
more than 100 papers in international conferences and journals. He was 
program chair of PKC (Public Key Cryptography) 2003, the 2002 ACM 
Workshop on Scientific Aspects of Cyber Terrorism and Crypto '94. His 
first paper that described a potential cyberterrorism scenario dates 
back to 1983. He is an editor of the Journal of Computer Security and 
of Information Processing Letters and is a director of the International

Association for Cryptologic Research.

Yvo Desmedt is ranked as the 2nd most prolific author (out of 1165
researchers) in Crypto/Eurocrypt. He has given invited lectures at 
several conferences and workshops in 5 different continents and more 
than 100 invited lectures for industry and academia. He is a recipient 
of the Society of Worldwide Inter-bank Funds Transfer (SWIFT) award.