Two Best Paper Awards for the KIT Research Group Practical IT Security

BEST PAPER AWARD / PIMRC 2020

This year's winners of the Best Paper Award at the PIMRC 2020 were the authors Paul Walther and Thorsten Strufe. For their paper "Blind Twins: Siamese Networks for Non Interactive Information Reconciliation" the former PhD student and his PhD supervisor received the Best Paper Award at this year's London IEEE Annual Symposium 2020 on "Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications" (IEEE PIMRC 2020). 

In their paper, both demonstrate that a key exchange with Physical Layer Security does not necessarily require an energy-consuming and insecure synchronization phase, and that two parties, informed by machine-learning models, can directly infer the state of the other party. Thus, energy resources are gained and additionally, potential attackers are prevented from obtaining information about the secret key material.

Link to the paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9217278 

BEST PAPER AWARD / RUNNER-UP AWARD OF THE SRDS 2020

Martin Byrenheid and Stefanie Roos from the same research group around Thorsten Strufe also went home with a prize at SRDS 2020. For their paper "Secure Embedding of Rooted Spanning Trees for Scalable Routing in Topology-Restricted Networks" they received the Best Paper Runner-Up Award. 

In order to protect the privacy of the participants and to make attacks more difficult, only those nodes in friend-to-friend networks communicate directly with each other whose operators have previously exchanged contact information. In order to be able to provide pseudonymized information to unknown participants, a distributed algorithm for the delivery of messages across several nodes is required. Due to its efficiency, route finding based on span trees is considered a promising approach for message delivery, which is also suitable for large, dynamic networks.
In their paper, they present several attacks on current solutions by which malicious participants can severely affect message delivery. Furthermore, they present their own pedigree based method, which is more robust against the presented attacks and thus makes active censorship more difficult.

Link to the paper: https://dud.inf.tu-dresden.de/byrenheid/byrenheid_srds2020.pdf 

The research group Practical IT Security deals with all aspects of technical data protection and network and IT security. The focus is on the development and analysis of security concepts against potential attackers on such systems. In addition, it is also interested in promoting the development of technologies that promote data protection in order to preserve the good of privacy in the digital world. Finally, they develop protocols and algorithms to secure the underlying communication and computing infrastructures.

The London IEEE Annual Symposium is one of the two major conferences of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) in the field of wireless communication and networking. Today, it is internationally regarded as one of the most important annual milestones in the industry and brings together industry and science alike.

The 39th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2020) is an international forum for the presentation and exchange of technological advances and research results in the areas of design, development and evaluation of distributed systems and brings together leading researchers, engineers and scientists in the field from around the world.