In the offensive technologies course, students learn how to test and judge the security of many IT related components, such as hardware and network protocols. They also learn how to report such findings and patch them, while also studying how to create offensive technologies themselves.
During paper sessions, students learn skills to find, read and assess relevant scientific publications. They also learn to build argumentation structures needed for theory and analysis.
Traditionally, cryptography is used to protect data in transit from an eavesdropping adversary. With the advent of big data and large-scale computation, cryptography can offer us much more.
The course focuses on Secure Computation that has developed as a central tool in cryptography — This allows multiple distributed parties to jointly compute on their private inputs, with the guarantee that nothing beyond the output is revealed.
The course focuses on technologies that can be used to protect data from unauthorized access. The main motivation is to protect personal data and comply with data protection legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union.