SFB 1119:  CROSSING - Cryptography-Based Security Solutions: Enabling Trust in New and Next Generation Computing Environments

• Subject Area: Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Physics
• Term: since 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236615297

Cryptography is an indispensable enabler for secure digital processes, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. Thereby, it allows many services to be executed securely through the Internet. Nevertheless, current cryptographic solutions do not solve all of the problems encountered in real-world applications. This has been true before CROSSING started in 2014 and further challenges still remain today. The overall goal of the Collaborative Research Center CROSSING thus was, and still is:To provide cryptography-based security solutions enabling trust in new and next generation computing environments. The solutions will meet the efficiency and security requirements of the new environments and will have sound implementations. They will be easy to use for developers, administrators, and end users of IT, even if they are not cryptography experts.Achieving the objective of CROSSING requires expertise from different disciplines. The collaborative spirit between the CROSSING members with their diverse research areas has led to significant progress and will continue to be the crucial success factor. The final phase of CROSSING will reach the maturity of the solutions, techniques, and methods developed in CROSSING I and II. We will have a coherent framework addressing the overall goal, in particular providing the opportunity to use crypto code with sound designs and implementations. Many of the primitives established in this phase will withstand superposition attacks and thus remain secure even in the face of rapidly evolving quantum technology. The solutions will meet the functional and efficiency requirements of current technology, with the extra angle of distributed cloud computing in mind. Testifying to the readiness, the evolution of the research project structure is augmented by the new transfer project area, in which the results of CROSSING will be refined with industry partners and transferred to practical settings.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• International Connection: Switzerland

Current projects

• E01 - Secure Integration of Cryptographic Software (Project Heads Bodden, Eric ;  Mezini, Mira )
• E03 - Secure Refinement of Cryptographic Algorithms (Project Heads Fischlin, Marc ;  Mantel, Heiko )
• E04 - Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols (Project Heads Katzenbeisser, Stefan ;  Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza ;  Schneider, Thomas )
• E07 - Transparency as User-Centered Intervention for Privacy and Security (Project Heads Reuter, Christian ;  Schneider, Thomas )
• MGK - Integrated Research Training Group (Project Heads Bruder, Ralph ;  Fischlin, Marc ;  Reuter, Christian )
• P01 - Future Public-Key Encryption and Signature Schemes (Project Heads Bischof, Christian ;  Buchmann, Johannes ;  Krämer, Juliane )
• P02 - Sanitizable Cryptography (Project Heads Faust, Sebastian ;  Fischlin, Marc ;  Janson, Christian )
• P03 - Hardware-Entangled Cryptography (Project Heads Katzenbeisser, Stefan ;  Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza )
• P04 - Quantum Key Hubs (Project Heads Alber, Gernot ;  Walther, Thomas )
• S02 - Attestation Protocols (Project Heads Davi, Lucas ;  Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza ;  Wachsmann, Christian )
• S03 - Privacy-Preserving Access and Verifiable Utilization (Project Heads Schulmann, Ph.D., Haya ;  Waidner, Michael )
• S04 - Strongly Secure Connection Establishment (Project Heads Alber, Gernot ;  Fischlin, Marc )
• S07 - Secure and Scalable Blockchain Technology (Project Heads Faust, Sebastian ;  Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza )
• T01 - Attestation of Smart Contract Execution (Project Head Davi, Lucas )
• T03 - Secure integration of application programming interfaces (Project Heads Bodden, Eric ;  Mezini, Mira )
• Z - Central Administrative Project (Project Heads Buchmann, Johannes ;  Fischlin, Marc )

Completed projects

• E05 - Privacy-Aware Distributed Computation (Project Heads Mezini, Mira ;  Salvaneschi, Guido )
• S01 - Scalable Trust Infrastructures (Project Heads Hollick, Matthias ;  Mühlhäuser, Max )
• S05 - Privacy-Preserving Computation (Project Heads Katzenbeisser, Stefan ;  Schneider, Thomas )
• S06 - Long-Term Secure Archiving (Project Heads Buchmann, Johannes ;  Katzenbeisser, Stefan )

• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Participating University: Universität Duisburg-Essen; Universität Paderborn; Universität Regensburg
• Participating Institution: Fraunhofer-Institut für Sichere Informationstechnologie (SIT)
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Johannes Buchmann, until 9/2019; Professor Dr. Marc Fischlin, since 10/2019