[HGI-News] Vortrag von Yvo Desmedt

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

Vortrag im Rahmen des HGI Seminars Kryptographie und Datensicherheit:

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                       Yvo Desmedt

             Florida State University, USA

          Montag, 20.10.2003, 13:15 Uhr, NA 1/58

       USING ECONOMICS AND ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE
          TO IDENTIFY CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES


Infrastructures are called critical, if the shut down of these may
seriously affect our economy or even the survival of potentially
millions of people.
The attack could be a combination of physical means (e.g. using
explosives) with hacking. Such a type of attack is often called cyber
terrorism or cyber war.
(Note that information warfare is a much broader concept including such
tools as propaganda.)

Cyber attacks differ from traditional attacks since these can be
replicated and done remotely. In this lecture we focus on the potential
vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures, and on developing
scientific methods to identify which infrastructures are critical. We do
not make predictions whether such an attack will take place. This
depends on the intend of the enemy to use it facing the potential
consequences and on the knowhow of the enemy of what to attack and how.

We introduce several new models. First we use artificial intelligence to
model our computerized infrastructures. Using economical models, we
propose an alternative way to model the enemy. In the traditional
approach to address security threats in distributed computations the
adversary will be bounded to break into k machines. Today such a model
is questionable since the cost to break into k+1 machines running the
same operating system is clearly less than the cost of breaking into k
machines using very different platforms.

We view as a futuristic hacker one that tries to optimize the attack
instead of just demonstrating the vulnerability of the system, as a
modern one does. We then describe different models to study which
infrastructures are critical to such a futuristic hacker. One of these
is based on flow. Can the enemy reduce the maximum flow to below a
critical value (e.g. too low to sustain water to a population)? A
disadvantageous of this model is that when modeling multiple
applications, it does not take an impact factor of that application into
account. An economical model is proposed to study such a "weighted"
critical capacity.

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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.

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           Horst Görtz Institut
für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik
     an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum

    http://www.hgi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
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