SPICY: Security & PrIvaCY

The SPICY research team addresses questions related to cryptographic protocols, privacy, and formal methods for security.

SPICY hosts 7 faculty members and researchers from CNRS,  ENS Rennes, INSA Rennes, and University of Rennes 1, and about 15 PhD students, engineers, and adjunct members.

As reflected by the media, cybersecurity has become an important concern for professionals, politicians, as well as simple citizens. The growing importance of cybersecurity comes from the fact that nowadays all our activities rely on computing systems. This includes laptops, smartphones, and more generally many devices we are using in our daily life which are continuously connected to the Internet. To secure our communication and provide us with a secure way to access on-line services, cryptographic protocols have been developed and deployed. Designing cryptographic protocols is a highly error-prone task and these protocols are in constant evolution to face new applications. These protocols might fail because of mistakes in the specification itself, or some security issues may be introduced in their implementation.

Nowdays, we also live with the risk of leaking our private data, and this risk needs to be mitigated. The recent adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation makes privacy a first-class citizen, and has to be considered along with security.

To mitigate the issues mentioned above both in term of security and privacy, it is necessary to improve informal reasoning and manual proofs with the development of rigorous methods in order to systematically analyze the systems we are using in our daily life. We rely for this on so-called formal methods. These are based on mathematical foundations and allow a rigorous analysis of a given system.

SPICY's activities can be divided into 3 research axes

• cryptographic protocols
• privacy
• formal methods for security