NTNU Applied Cryptology Lab (NaCl)

Our research questions and findings are relevant to the broader context of current and future challenges of the networked information society:  Secure telecommunications and networked services with functionality for authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy, and verifiability of communications. 

National and international cyber security

Challenges within critical ICT-based infrastructure robustness, lawful communication interception and data retention, cryptanalysis, digital evidence and forensic investigation methods and techniques, privacy issues and “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“Who will guard the guards themselves?”)

Digital credential management

Challenges are: (i) identification, credentials, with applications including e-government and e-university services, (ii) electronic payments, digital cash, electronic and web commerce transactions, (iii) privacy, anonymity and traceability according to law, such as digital health data.

Multimedia communication and content distribution

Copyright, copy protection, conditional access, source identification. Challenges include digital rights mechanisms for multimedia content distribution and author/source attribution functions.

Ubiquitous security for the Zettabyte Era

Data in transfer per year is now in the zettabyte range (1021 bytes), and data at rest is already more than 20 zettabytes. The importance of information security and cryptology is constantly increasing, and has become one of the crucial sustainability pillars of our modern civilization. According to some researchers, the Zettabyte Era has brought the new paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT), which is currently in the early phase of being the Botnet of Things. This means that security mechanisms are still lacking behind the massiveness of the devices that are connected and sending, receiving and storing data in insecure ways.