Boris Köpf has been awarded a grant from the 2014 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Scholarship Program on the topic of “Reasoning about Side Channels in Cryptographic Protocols”. The project goal is to devise techniques that enable reasoning about side-channel leakage in cryptographic protocols. The promise of the proposed approach is to achieve high degrees of security and performance at the same time. To this end, the two main challenges are: first, how to do compositional reasoning about leakage and its aggregation; and, second, how to embed low-level binary analysis into this compositional context.

The list of selected projects is available here.