Department of Computer Science,
Universität des Saarlandes

The University of Saarland was founded in 1948 with French support in Saarbrücken/Germany. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Saarland has a very high ranking in German academic surveys and belongs to the best three in Germany.

Saarland contributed to the development of the MAFTIA conceptual framework and assessment methods, in close cooperation with IBM Zurich and QinetiQ in particular. Their main contribution was the development of the first rigorous model for reactive cryptographic systems that allows for formal specification and verification of security protocols under a standard cryptographic semantics. In other words, this model allows the production of security proofs that are correct from a cryptographer's point of view, unlike previous approaches, which yielded proofs that were cryptographically not convincing.

The approach supports both synchronous and asynchronous networks, as well as arbitrary adversary models. These models have been applied within the MAFTIA project to prove the security of several basic MAFTIA protocols and systems, and also used to prove the security of a "cryptographic library" that can be used in formal models very much like the classical Dolev-Yao model as a "faithful" abstraction of cryptographic primitives.

People at Saarland

These people worked on MAFTIA. Names in bold are Executive Board members, others are Research Associates.

André Adelsbach
Birgit Pfitzmann (now at IBM Zurich)
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
Matthias Schunter
Michael Steiner (now at IBM Thomas Watson)
Christian Stueble