COMPUTER SCIENCE & CRYPTOLOGY
Estonian e-state builder
Peeter Laud:
Vaccinations could have been organised much more efficiently Peeter Laud, a senior researcher at Cybernetica AS, can be considered one of the founders of cryptology and cryptographic protocol analysis in Estonia. He obtained his doctorate from Saarland University in Germany in 2002 when he was just 25 years old.
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is research is aimed at preventing security incidents in complex software systems. This is done using static analysis of the program code of the systems, which enables the correctness and security of the programs to be verified without starting the program itself. It is no wonder then that his research team also has an important role to play in controlling and improving the security of Estonia’s e-state. Even now they are analysing a number of proposals, such as those related to e-elections. “We also act as consultants to the Information System Authority,” Laud explained. “If something needs to be analysed, we can do it: we can guarantee that attacks belonging to certain classes will not be successful. We’ve also performed security analyses of larger systems and calculated the cost of attacks.” This latter means that Laud and his team seek to determine how easy or difficult and how cheap or expensive it is to carry out a specific attack. How likely is it that a PIN code will be guessed? What is the probability that the attacker will be caught? “For example, in the case of a PIN code, the cost can be zero and the probability one in 10,000,” he said.
Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research
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