Presentation

 

As reflected by the media, cybersecurity and especially cyberattacks, has become an important concern for professionals, politicians, as well as simple citizens. The growing importance of cybersecurity comes from the fact that nowadays all our activities rely on computing systems. This includes laptops, smartphones, and more generally many devices we are using in our daily life which are continuously connected to the Internet. To secure our communication and provide us with a secure way to access online services, cryptographic protocols have been developed and deployed. Designing cryptographic protocols is a highly error-prone task and these protocols are in constant evolution to face new applications. These protocols might fail because of mistakes in the specification itself, or some security issues may be introduced in their implementation.

Nowdays, we also live with the risk of leaking our private data, and this risk needs to be mitigated. The recent adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation makes privacy a first-class citizen, and has to be considered along with security. To mitigate the issues mentioned above both in terms of security and privacy, we can perform risk analysis, and we also propose to rely on formal methods with mathematical foundations to perform a rigorous analysis of a given protocol, or to allow the analysis of classes of protocols through the development of verification techniques and tools. In both cases, we advocate for the need of improving informal reasoning and manual proofs with the development of rigorous methods in order to systematically analyse the systems we are using in our daily life.