Thor Martinsen to receive a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for visiting the Selmer Center

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Thor Martinsen, an applied mathematics professor, has become the first Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Permanent Military Professor (PMP) to receive a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award that will allow him to visit the Selmer Center at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway and collaborate on cryptographic Boolean functions research during the 2021-2022 academic year.

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The BoolTI project under Lilya Budaghyan

BoolTI is the newest project at the Selmer center, with Lilya Budaghyan as the PI and a budget of 10.5 MNOK for the period 2021-2024. Other key members are Claude Carlet, George Petrides, and Vincent Rijmen.

Cryptographic ciphers serve the very important function of securing our every day communication and data against unauthorised access. They are in use everywhere: web-browsers, mobile phones, payment cards, tv-decoders, smart cards, etc. The fact that more and more of them are now run in embedded devices makes the rather recent side channel attacks (SCA) a huge threat: unwanted information leakage during the execution of the algorithms could potentially compromise their security. The project will study Boolean functions used as building blocks in cryptographic ciphers in order to find ways to prevent SCA.

Vincent Rijmen receives RSA award for excellence in mathematics

Professor Vincent Rijmen, best known as one of the designers of the ubiquitously used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), has received the RSA award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics. The award “recognizes innovation and ongoing contributions to the field of cryptography and mathematics”. More information can be found at the RSA conference website. Congratulations!

The Ernst Selmer National Event

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Prof. Ernst Sejersted Selmer, the 11th of February, from 08:00 to 16:00, the Ernst Selmer National Event will be held in the auditorium at Vilvite, in Bergen. It will gather national collaborators, representatives from the government, the University of Bergen, and other organizations.

The event is organised by the Selmer Center and Simula@UiB.