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Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography

Protecting your world

COSIC is headed by Prof. Joos Vandewalle, Prof. Claudia Diaz, Prof. Bart Preneel, Prof. Vincent Rijmen and Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede.

The goal of COSIC's research activities is to create a secure electronic equivalent for interactions in the physical world such as confidentiality, signatures, identification, anonymity, payment and elections. The research concentrates on the design, evaluation, and implementation of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, on the development of security architectures for information and communication systems and on the development of security mechanisms for embedded systems.

COSIC's theoretical work is mainly based on discrete mathematics such as number theory, finite fields, Boolean algebra, but also includes statistics and optimization. The aim is to achieve efficient and secure solutions. The broader goal is to achieve efficient and secure multi-party computation. These mathematical tools are applied to increase our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of cryptographic algorithms and to develop new and better algorithms such as block ciphers, stream ciphers, public-key encryption algorithms and zero-knowledge identification protocols.

One of the well-known successes is the selection of Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Currently AES is used by millions of users in more than thousand products, such as the protection of US government information. COSIC is also coordinating ECRYPT II, a European-wide Network of Excellence in the area of cryptology and watermarking.

COSIC organizes bi-weekly seminars on Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography. No registration or fee is required to attend the seminars. The talks are given in English and take approximately one hour.

COSIC provides consultancy in the area of computer security and cryptography. It is a research team of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (IBBT).

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