Overview
In today's rapidly changing world, security is of great concern. Companies change, undergo mergers and make acquisitions, and their information infrastructure becomes virtual. People are becoming increasingly mobile, employees work remotely from anywhere in the world, and devices are increasingly interconnected.
Security technology must respond to these changes. It is no longer sufficient to guard against a single entrance to a trusted domain; rather, many and diverse connections from the untrusted outside world to the trusted domain must be protected.
Approach
Our research concentrates on many aspects of information security:
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Authentication solutions
Secure identity cards and identification systems help businesses and agencies restrict access to physical locations and secure networks. They also provide an identity verification process for receiving government services or conducting online transactions. -
Data storage security
The most valuable asset in today's information society is data, which must be stored, backed-up, and archived. Many modern storage systems secure the data using cryptography, which poses new challenges for managing encryption keys. Furthermore, novel techniques guarantee the cryptographic integrity of stored data. -
Formal verification tools
Security solutions benefit greatly from formal verification of designs and implementations, a field we are exploring through our participation in the EU AVANTSSAR research project. -
Identity governance
Today's users have to manage many different online identities. We envision user-controlled identity management systems that respect user privacy and protect personally identifiable information. -
Internet transaction security
The IBM Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC) protects online authentication and Internet transactions against state-of-the-art attacks without using special software. -
Security policies
Security policies define how a secure system should interact with its environment. In the highly interconnected world of today, policies are crucial for understanding how multiple secure systems interact with each other. -
Secure virtualization in cloud computing
Cloud computing aims at flexible scalable infrastructures using virtualized resources. Although virtualization improves efficiency and flexibility, it also introduces new threats. We mitigate these threats by means of new security technologies for protecting virtual environments. Moreover, we design novel mechanisms that provide protection levels only available in virtualized systems.
Further information
Our team maintains close links with the international security and cryptography research communities by means of our research contributions as publications, our participation in scientific conferences, and our contributions to joint research projects.
IBM Research - Zurich is a founding member of the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC), a cooperation dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information security, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.
See also
