COSIC

Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography

Abbreviation	COSIC
Purpose	Security research
Leader	Prof. Joos Vandewalle Prof. Claudia Diaz Prof. Bart Preneel Prof. Vincent Rijmen Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede
Parent organization	Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (IBBT) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Staff	22
Volunteers	39
Website	www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/

The Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography research group, commonly called COSIC, is a research group at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, which is headed by Professor Bart Preneel, Vincent Rijmen, and Professor Ingrid Verbauwhede.

The goal of COSIC's research activities is to create a secure electronic equivalent for interactions in the physical world such as confidentiality, signatures, identification, anonymity, payment and elections. The research concentrates on the design, evaluation, and implementation of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, on the development of security architectures for information and communication systems and on the development of security mechanisms for embedded systems. COSIC's theoretical work is mainly based on discrete mathematics such as number theory, finite fields, Boolean algebra, but also includes statistics and optimization. The aim is to achieve efficient and secure solutions. The broader goal is to achieve efficient and secure multi-party computation. These mathematical tools are applied to increase our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of cryptographic algorithms and to develop new and better algorithms such as block ciphers, stream ciphers, public-key encryption algorithms and zero-knowledge identification protocols.

One of the well-known successes is the selection of Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Currently AES is used by millions of users in more than thousand products, such as the protection of US government information. COSIC is also coordinating ECRYPT, a European-wide Network of Excellence in the area of cryptology and watermarking.

External links

• Official website
• ECRYPT