Centre for Cyber Trust

At the Centre for Cyber Trust, IT professors from ETH Zurich and the University of Bonn are aiming to develop security systems that are one hundred percent trustworthy. They believe the safest path leads through the physical world, where we communicate face to face.

Today, we use our credit card at the supermarket, fill in electronic forms for public services, manage our money online. Digital technologies make everyday life easier, but they also demand that users have a great deal of faith – faith that has been undermined time and again through the actions of scammers. Hackers disrupt websites while cybercriminals intercept data or trick users into entering their access data for fake bank accounts – or they fool them into responding to phoney emails.

To prevent such actions, the computer scientists at the Centre for Cyber Trust of ETH Zurich and the University of Bonn are developing a fundamentally new security infrastructure for the internet. In their project, the research team led by David Basin, Peter Müller and Adrian Perrig from ETH Zurich want to transfer our real-world relationships of trust to the digital realm as a way of authenticating the identity of online communication partners.

The researchers are devising various methods. In one, the idea is that, on meeting for the first time, two parties simulate a “handshake” with their phones to exchange a cryptographic key for future digital correspondence. Another area of work focuses on a digital protective emblem that would shield humanitarian institutions like hospitals or the Red Cross from hackers.