Sedat Akleylek
sedat.akleylek@ut.ee
The projects are suitable for all degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD)
A Comparison of Post-Quantum Symmetric-based Signature Schemes
The task is to understand the symmetric-based signature schemes submitted to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. The signature schemes are Picnic, AIMer, Ascon-Sign, FAEST, SPHINCS, SPHINCS-Alpha [1,2, 3]. At least 3 signature schemes are selected for both theoretical and practical comparison. The comparison includes performance analysis (running time, etc.) and the structural similarities/differences.
[2] https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/pqc-dig-sig/round-2-additional-signatures
[3] https://kpqc.or.kr/competition_02.html
Performance Analysis of Quantum Secure Digital Signature Algorithms in Blockchain
The security of blockchain depends on traditional public key cryptography (elliptic curve algorithms, etc.) and hash functions (SHA-256, etc.); however, the arrival of large-scale quantum computers would make these public-key cryptographic methods susceptible to quantum-based attacks due to Shor’s algorithm. There are several studies to explore the performance of post-quantum signatures for blockchain and/or cryptocurrency systems [1, 2, 3]. The task is to prepare a report on those algorithms and analyze the performances of the lattice-based digital signature schemes, such as Crystal Dilithium, FALCON, and Hawk, in blockchain systems.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2023.3325761
[2] https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_11
A Report on the Host-Based Intrusion Detection-Prevention Systems
A host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) monitors and analyzes the internal activities of a computer system, including network traffic on its interfaces, similar to a network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS). Unlike NIDS, which focuses on overall network traffic, HIDS specializes in detecting internal threats by tracking host activities. The task is to classify the machine/deep learning methods used in HIDS, give the details about the datasets, define the advantages/disadvantages, and compare them according to the success rate.
Maiara Bollauf
maiara.bollauf@ut.ee
The projects are suitable for MSc and PhD students interested in code and lattice-based cryptography. Desired background includes linear algebra and number theory.
Attacks on the Code Equivalence Problem
The code equivalence problem (CEP) asks to find, if it exists, an isometry between two linear codes. The hardness of this problem is highly dependent on information given by the hull of a code, i.e., the intersection between a code and its dual. The goal of this project is to study a recent attack on the CEP involving simply the coordinate-wise (or Schur) product between such codes.
Heart of Lattice-Based Cryptography
My research interests are mostly focused on the mathematics of lattice-based cryptography and I am open to exploring any problem along this theoretical direction. If this aligns with your interests, please reach out so we can discuss potential topics.
Arnis Paršovs
arnis.parsovs@ut.ee
Applied Cyber Security Topics
Applied cyber security group offers research seminar supervision on various cyber security-related topics for students who are interested in more applied research that may involve hands-on activities as well. Various hardware can be provided to students for experiments. Students who are doing applied research must still describe the research they have performed in a seminar report and convince the supervisor that the work done is worth 3 ECTS (~78 hours of work).
Students are welcome to contact Arnis Paršovs (arnis.parsovs@ut.ee) with their seminar topic ideas.
Recommended prerequisites: Applied Cryptography (MTAT.07.017) / Web Security (LTAT.04.018)
Level:BSc, MSc or PhD
Pille Pullonen-Raudvere
pille.pullonen-raudvere@cyber.ee
Super-Rushing Adversaries and Security Against Them
This topic is based on a CRYPTO 2025 paper, an extended version is available here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1394.pdf The goal is to understand the security notion of super-rushing adversaries proposed in this paper. The task is to prepare a report and presentation about the security notion and how it differs from previous notions such as rushing adversaries. Also, discuss why some secure multi-party computation protocols are naturally resilient against such adversaries.
Secure Computation Functionalities from Function Secret Sharing
Function secret sharing is a method for securely sharing a function so that two parties can later evaluate this function and learn additively secret shared results. In theory the notion applies to all functions but in practice reasonable constructions are known for distributed point functions and distributed comparison functions. The goal of this project is to study how these functions are used to support various other operations such as machine learning activation functions like ReLu or sigmoid.
The main sources for this work are https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1392 and https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1095
I am also open to supervising other secure multi-party computation related topics.