SECReT 2009 PhD projects
- The transfer, persistence and secondary transfer of gunshot residue (GSR): Implications for crime reconstruction and forensic protocol studied using Bayesian modelling
- To what extent can forensic evidence aid in the investigation and prosecution of internal child sex trafficking (ICST)?
- Complex systems approaches to issues in crime and security
- Developing tools for anticipating and mitigating the negative societal impact, while preserving the positive impact, of security technologies for use by the developers of these technologies upstream in the design process.
- How new ways of spatial analysis can improve the geographical understanding of illegal drug markets and the distribution of drug-related crime
- Computational cryptography
- Developing analytical Blood Pattern Analysis (BPA) techniques for environmentally altered bloodstains; and examining the range and influence of visualization methods available for BPA presentation in the context of jury decision making.
- Optimisation of illicit material detection using X-ray diffraction: Drug identification using Low Angle X-ray Scatter - DILAX III
- Improving the understanding of and responses to internal child sex trafficking in the UK: An empirical multi-method analysis
- Securing threat detection: Synergy of technological and neuropsychological factors
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Computational cryptography
7 March 2012
This research will explore some existing, and develop some new, cryptanalytic attacks in the area of hash functions and block ciphers. It includes a detailed analysis regarding cryptanalysis of hash functions, particularly the specifications of the GOST hash function (a cryptographic hash function used by the Russian National Federation). The research explores the most successful existing attack on this hash function based on some specifications of the underlying block cipher and includes a new black-box attack on the compression function f of the GOST hash function. The innovation in our attack is that it is a generic attack and works also if the underlying block cipher is replaced by any other cipher of the same input-output dimension instead of the attack presented by Mendel et al which is a specific attack.
Multiplicative Complexity (MC) was introduced for cryptanalysis purposes in 2008 by Boyar and Peralta. Techniques from this area of combinatorial optimization can be used for the security analysis of current cryptographic schemes and especially in the area of multi-dimensional Boolean functions (SBoxes).
The research applies the circuit-minimization techniques as proposed by Boyar and Peralta and combines it with our SAT solver software to obtain more compact representations of the 4-bit S-boxes of the PRESENT and GOST cipher with respect to their multiplicative complexity. These minimal representations seem to be very promising at preventing side channel attacks on cryptographic chips such as Differential Power Analysis (DPA).
