Introducing Swiss Cyber Storm 2017 Speaker Raphael Reischuk
The more we depend on the internet for our everyday lives, the more we realize how many design flaws are built into its basic architecture. The net was built for scale and resilience, but it was not built for security. The much needed performance boosts often come in the form of bolt-on hacks instead of long-term visions. You could say that we are painting ourselves into a corner of a room stacked with RFCs.
Through the years, there have been many attempts to push a new basic design for the internet. Some of them have lead to improvements in individual protocols, others vanished without leaving many traces outside of specialized technical journals.
In recent years, researchers of the Network Security Group at the ETH in Zurich have pondered their own proposal: The SCION Project. The drafts have been reworked, proof of concepts have been done and countless papers have been peer-reviewed and published.
Lately, the activities intensified. Real-world deployments have started and the team of the ETH Network Security Group started to share its ideas outside of specialized circles. Banks, insurance companies and Internet providers are now interested in getting acquainted with the new technology.
Dr. Raphael Reischuk, formerly at ETH
I met one of these team members in spring at a SIGS conference. We hit it off immediately, but I was reluctant to add his presentation to the program for Swiss Cyber Storm since I thought it too heavy on the network side.
More talks followed, a reorganisation of the schedule bringing more space and here we are: I am very happy to announce Dr. Raphael Reischuk from the SCION Project.
Raphael received his PhD from Saarland University for a privacy-related dissertation: He created a protocol that allows an electricity consumer to keep his or her exact consumption data private, to communicate the amount of the electricity bill to the utility, and to guarantee the utility that the communicated amounts are correct. This confirmation is performed with the help of zero-knowledge proofs.
Publications as this are typical for Raphael’s interests that lie with cryptographic primitives and the construction of secure protocols based on these building blocks. He must be quite good at this since his PhD received a “summa cum laude” and that electricity consumption article was awarded with the CNIL-Inria Award for Privacy Protection, granted by the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty in France.
I hear Raphael is also an avid hiker who loves nature a lot. Maybe this love for the Alps prevented him from accepting one of the various job offers outside Switzerland so far. All the better for us.
Raphael Reischuk, high in the Alps
Join the Swiss Cyber Storm conference on October 18 to hear more about the SCION project by registering here.
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