Computer Journal Wilkes Award for Serge Vaudenay

Professor Serge Vaudenay, head of the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, has won the Computer Journal Wilkes Award 2014.

The winning paper is called “On Selecting the Nonce Length in Distance-Bounding Protocols”.

In 2011, Vaudenay's team began working on distance-bounding protocols.
With these techniques, a device such as a wireless credit card can prove proximity to a payment terminal. This can be used to defeat relay attacks, in which an adversary passively relays messages from a credit card to a far-away payment terminal to make a payment without the credit card holder being aware of it.

Pedro Peris Lopez visited EPFL in 2011. Katerina Mitrokotsa and Christos Dimitrakakis were doing postdoctoral research. Together with Serge Vaudenay, they discovered that the security of distance bounding protocols depends more on the length of the random numbers which are exchanged during these protocols than on the length of the secret key.

The Wilkes Award is given for the best paper(s) published in a volume of The Computer Journal. It is awarded each year to the author(s) of a paper appearing in the previous volume (year). Criteria for the Award are originality and quality of theme and treatment. The assessment is made by members of the Editorial Board.

The Wilkes Award is named after Sir Maurice Wilkes, who was Director of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory throughout the entire development of stored program computers starting with EDSAC; inventor of labels, macros and microprogramming; with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, the inventor of a programming system based on subroutines.

Further information on http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/computer_journal/wilkes_award.html.