Biometrics is a key fundamental security mechanism, which links the identity of an individual to a physical characteristic or action of that individual. Possibilities that are being exploited include fingerprints, facial recognition, speaker verification, dynamic signature recognition, iris and retinal scanning, hand geometry and keystroke dynamics. Others are in development.
PNA4 participates in a EU-IST project called BioVision which contributes to a secure, user-friendly, socially acceptable and ethical use of biometrics in Europe by the development of a roadmap for future EU biometrics Research.
The emergence of public-key cryptography has triggered the study of algorithms for factorization and primality testing, for computing discrete logarithms, and for the solution of large sparse systems of linear equations over finite fields. Research on the algorithmic and implementational improvement of the Number Field Sieve factoring method (NFS) has led to factorizations of numbers of world record size. CWI's NFS factoring code is continuously applied to the largest possible RSA numbers, as a validation of the widely used RSA cryptosystem. Currently, the four largest RSA numbers factored with help of this code have 155 (512 bits), 140 and 130 decimal digits.
Security protocols such as the (in)famous Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol are analysed using algebraic verification, state space generation, model checking and theorem proving.
Sjouke Mauw, who is part-time seconded to CWI (from Eindhoven Technical University), works on smartcard security, network security and formal verification of security protocols. He teaches several security-related courses at the University of Amsterdam, and is co-founder of the Eindhoven Computer Science Security Group.
One of the main applications of an NWO project on coalgebraic modal logics (in collaboration with Bart Jacobs at Nijmegen University and Yde Venema at the University of Amsterdam) is security in mobile environments. The aim is to use such logics to express and analyse security issues in Java.
Research is performed on sending over quantum information in a secure fashion, on quantum coinflip protocols, and on quantum distributed systems.
The focus of the research lies in the use of computational logic, ranging from proof systems to constraint logic programming, for specifying, simulating, debugging and verifying security protocols. Sandro Etalle, who is part-time seconded to CWI (from Twente University), is co-founder of SAFE-NL.