SRM seminar

Abstracts

Speaker: Georges-Axel Jaloyan
Title: The ABC of Next-Gen Shellcoding
Abstract: Shellcodes are short executable stubs that are used in various attack scenarios, whenever code execution is possible. After briefly recalling how they work in general and what interesting things they can do, besides obviously running a reverse-shell, we'll have to deal with the reality that shellcodes are usually not particularly stealthy, due in part to the very suspicious presence of non-printable characters. In a tutorial-like fashion, we'll address increasingly more complex constraints starting from basic alphanumeric shellcodes on x86, up to English looking-text shellcodes, straying into unconventional architectures like ARMv8 or even the new and trendy RISC-V.

Speaker: Sofía Celi
Title: The state of secure messaging: the case of OTRv4
Abstract: OTRv4 is the newest version of the Off-The-Record messaging protocol. As a Privacy Enhancing Technology and cryptographic work, it is a protocol where the newest academic research intertwines with real-world implementations, which can take different forms. This new version asks us to revisit definitions around deniability (participation, message, online and offline); forward and post-compromise secrecy; how to best implement a protocol; and how important security and privacy properties are to the world. In this talk, we will examine the key security properties that secure messaging protocols and applications should have and provide; how they are implemented; and what challenges lies ahead for the secure messaging sphere. We will explore how these properties are achieved in OTRv4, in particular, and why they are needed in today’s world.

Speaker: Mohamed Bourennane
Title: Quantum Secure Communication
Abstract: The banking, financial, and defence sectors crucially depend on communication through channels that cannot be intercepted by unauthorized people. Today, different types of sensitive information are sent within and between companies. All of these users employ cryptography to keep their data secret. Today’s cryptographic protocols rely on RSA or so-called elliptical curves methods. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that these methods will remain safe in the near future, especially having in mind the potential growth of the computation power. Fortunately, quantum mechanics makes it possible to solve the key transfer problem in a new and proven safe manner. Unlike RSA and similar methods, it is nature’s laws that guarantee the security of quantum cryptography. In this talk, I will introduce and review our research in quantum secure communication and also the worldwide effort in quantum technologies.

Speaker: Cheng-Te Li
Title: Learning Sleep Quality from Daily Logs
Abstract: Precision psychiatry is a new research field that uses advanced data mining over a wide range of neural, behavioral, psychological, and physiological data sources for classification of mental health conditions. In this talk, I will present a computational framework for predicting sleep efficiency of insomnia sufferers. We predict sleep efficiency of individual users with a proposed interpretable LSTM-Attention (LA Block) neural network model. We also propose a model, Pairwise Learning-based Ranking Generation (PLRG), to rank users with high insomnia potential in the next day. Our computational framework can be used for other applications that analyze and handle noisy and incomplete time-series human activity data in the domain of precision psychiatry.

For questions and comments contact Jun or Peter .