Vashek (Vaclav) Matyas 

Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University                      
Botanicka 68a                        
602 00 Brno - Czech Republic             E-mail: LastName at fi.muni.cz

GPG/PGP keys - operational (GPG), old (PGP)

Office hours: not until Sep 2012, 
on sabbatical at the Center for Research on 
Computation and Society (CRCS), Harvard University.

Current activities:

Security of wireless sensor networks, with focus on security protocols, intrusion detection and also privacy. A starting discussion of issues in this area can be found in our paper Attack detection vs. privacy - How to find the link or how to hide it? presented at the 2011 Security Protocols Workshop. Our work on neighbour-based intrusion detection for wireless sensor setworks, partly presented at the Sixth International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications (ICWMC) 2010 in Valencia, Spain, is available as the technical report FIMU-RS-2010-04. Our work on Secrecy Amplification Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks appears at the ACM WiSec 2009, and other results came out in a book chapter in From Problem to Solution: Wireless Sensor Networks Security by Nova Publishers. Some of the work on group support for authenticated key exchange and on secrecy amplification in the technical report FIMU-RS-2007-05.

Study of biometric authentication systems. A full version of a paper written with Zdenek Riha and presented at the Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management Applications 2010 conference, is available as the technical report FIMU-RS-2010-07. We have a book on biometric authentication (in Czech), where I took care of co-editing (and writing up some) chapters. An older summary paper reviewing major security and usability issues of biometric authentication systems was presented at the Communications and Multimedia Security Conference, summary of trends and visions was presented at the Information Security Summit 2002, and few other papers presented at other conferences. A good summarizing article Toward Reliable User Authentication through Biometrics appeared in IEEE Security & Privacy and an introductory technical report written also with Zdenek Riha is also available.

Security of random number generation, with focuses on both truly and pseudorandom number generation in the mobile environment. Our recent work Towards True Random Number Generation in Mobile Environments appears at the NordSec 2009 (paper download), and earlier work with more experimental results appeared in paper The Sources of Randomness in Mobile Devices, NordSec 2007 (paper download).

Information privacy, where we undertook another privacy valuation experiment, results from which are prepared for a publication, following the attention of both expert and general public that has been drawn to our Value of Location Privacy paper (copyright ACM, presented at WPES 2006). This work has been undertaken in the framework of activities around the FIDIS Network of Excellence. Earlier on, we also examined ways to model the state of privacy in a given system - and possibly to use this model for evaluating various aspects of privacy. We started with a critical review of the older Common Criteria approach, provided for additional definitions of unlinkability and also refined the approach, revising also the Freiburg Privacy Diamond work of Alf Zugenmeier et al. Preliminary results of our work are in contributions to the Privacy and Security workshops of Ubicomp 2004 and Fourth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, and the underlying considerations were presented at the Cambridge Workshop on Security Protocols. In my earlier work in this area, I also worked on analysing and reporting doctor-level prescribing information in the Xponent project with IMS Health. A paper (draft of which is available here) for Healthcare Informatics Journal 4.3-4 outlines some of the issues. Yet older work involves participation in drafting the Privacy Class of the Common Criteria, and also work relevant to the Canadian privacy scene that was presented as the Technical Report "Information Privacy in Canada (Legislation in the Face of Changing Technologies)", TR-246, School of Computer Science, Carleton University.

Shouldersurfing attacks, namely in relation to the Chip&PIN card payment authorisation. We conducted an intensive study to compare the (in)security of signature- vs. PINpad-based payment authorisation by customers. More results came out in an IEEE Computer article, results from the first round of our experiments are available either as old slides or drafted lecture notes (final version can be found in the proceedings of 2005 Cambridge Workshop on Security Protocols). A book on these and related issues on authentication and authorization is available in Czech.

Conferences, workshops, etc. The first regional event to mention is Mikulasska kryptobesidka, our annual Czech cryptology workshop - aiming to facilitate closer cooperation of professionals working in the field of applied cryptography and related areas of security.

I also take part in the Program Committees or regular paper reviews of events like 26th IFIP International Information Security Conference (SEC 2011), 3rd International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2011), and ACM 2011 SAC Track on Applied Biometrics, Information Security Summit, where I chair the Steering Committe.

Data Security Management (DSM) - Czech security journal published bi-monthly, where I'm member of the journal Editorial Board. (And I shouldn't forget its annual Information Security Summit, the region's prime event in the area of information security.)

My lectures in security/crypto here at the Masaryk University: More information on these courses can be found through the university webpages on my courses, and we also opened our new lab at FI, which is a coherent part and co-founder of BUSLab.

Information for our students inquiring about supervision, support, etc. can be found at this page. Yet I only plan to take new PhD students from September 2012 since I will spend December 2011 - July 2012 at the Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with a kind support of the Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship.

I supervise PhD students Vit Bukac, Jaromir Dobias, Filip Jurnecka, Jiri Kur, Tobias Smolka, Martin Stehlik, Andriy Stetsko, Pavel Tucek, and I had the pleasure to supervise PhD graduates Jan (Honza) Krhovjak, Marek Kumpost, Petr Svenda.

Older stuff:
Just in case you met me during my sabbatical in 2003/04 either as a Visiting Researcher with Microsoft Research Cambridge, or a Visiting Lecturer with University College Dublin, Department of Computer Science, then yes, it is me. :-) And again thanks to both these institutions, their employees, and other visitors at the time for their kind hospitality, inspiring discussions, etc.
Vashek Matyas
E-mail: LastName at fi.muni.cz
Wed Nov 30, 2011