Mission and Research Themes of ISPLab

The Information Security and Privacy Lab is part of the Multimedia Signal Processing Group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, of the Delft University of Technology.

Mission

The mission of ISPL is to help individuals, industries and governments by satisfying their security and privacy needs while providing innovative short and long term solutions. Our approach is that within a specific application domain (e.g. transport and logistics, finance, internet etc.) the properties of data, services or devices are used as a starting point in order to develop new primitives and protocols or enhancing existing ones; as such creating appropriate solutions for our security and privacy needs.

Usability of the solutions which have been found is an important principle. Therefore it is always tried to embed our research in (inter)national research programs and to have a close cooperation with industries and governments.

Since in ISPLs philosophy security is broader than cryptography we stimulate the inter-/ multidisciplinary approach.

Research subjects and application domains

Considering the cryptographic primitives and subjects, we focus on:

Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET)
Search in encrypted domains
Trust management
Intrusion detection

Homomorphic encryption
Secure computing and multiparty computation
Lightweight cryptographic algorithms
Authentication/Key management/Encryption
Group-, forward-, blind digital signatures
Protocol attacks
(Linear feedback shift registers and random sequences)

Considering the applications areas, our lab is active in:
Privacy: Online social networks, recommender systems, clustering,
Internet and telecom: agent technology, watermarking, secure search and computing
Semi public spaces, transport and logistics: RFIDs, (OV-chip card)
Finance and insurance: Data leakage, digital money
(Healtcare: Electronic Patient Records)

Past and Present Projects

  • Kindred Spirits (KS) The KS Project is funded by the STW programme and involves several research and industrial partners including University of Twente, Philips, TNO and Irdeto. The main goal is to protect the privacy in social networks. Further information can be obtained here.
  • Pearl The Pearl Project is funded by the Sentinels programme and involves partners including University of Twente, TU/e, Radboud Nijmegen, Philips and TNO. The goal of the PEARL project is to develop practical security controls for RFID-based systems, and a corresponding assessment methodology. Further information can be obtained here.
  • Signal Processing in the Encrypted Domain (SPEED) SPEED was supported by EU-FP5 FET programme between years 2006 and 2009 with international partners including Philips, KU Leuven, Universities of Bochum, Siena and Florence. SPEED focussed on merging cryptography with signal processing to address the protection of privacy-sensitive data in several signal processing applications like face recognition, classifiers and branching programs. Please refer to this link for further information.
  • Privacy in an Ambient World (PAW) The PAW was supported by Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs between 2003 and 2007 with partners including TNO, University of Twente and Radbaud Nijmegen. The objective of the PAW project was to develop a privacy protecting architecture that can provide full privacy of the user in an ambient world. Further information can be found here.
  • Privacy Incorperated Software Agent (PISA) PISA was supported by EU-FP5 programme between 2001 and 2003 with international partners including TNO and GlobalSign. The focus was on specifying, validating and promoting open and secure service provision architecture to provide new services by software agents to users, moving across networks and service providers.