Thesis defence: On the Trustworthiness of Trusted Third Parties

Published: 2025-02-25

Joakim Brorsson defends his thesis "On the Trustworthiness of Trusted Third Parties."

Zoom link: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/67331586615
Zoom ID: 67331586615.

External link to thesis. 

Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) are a standard building block in secure systems and are used in many cryptographic protocols. A TTP is an entity which facilitates interaction between the users in a system. As the name suggests, TTPs are trusted, and can thus be relied on to perform critical parts of a protocol without need for external scrutiny. Due to this property, they can serve the role of making protocols easier to design, maintain and participate in.

Since TTPs are trusted, they often have access to some of the most sensitive information in a system; e.g., in backup systems, or when used for privileged roles such as certificate authorities. If a TTP is not as trustworthy as assumed, the consequences can be severe. This is often the case in practice, where multiple examples of failures among high-profile TTPs exist. For example, data leaks are common news and certificate authorities have been caught issuing incorrect certificates. This illustrates the problem that the trustworthiness of a TTP is often more of a convenient assumption than a system property motivated by properly investigated system mechanisms.

Thesis defence: Performance limits for microstrip patch antennas

Published: 2025-02-12

Ben Nel defends his thesis:
Performance Limits for Microstrip Patch Antennas.

Zoom link: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/63106127825
Zoom ID: 63106127825. 

External link to thesis:
https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/performance-limits-for-microstrip-patch-antennas