Tallinn University of Technology:
4.4.15. Research Group: Faculty of Information Technology: Cyber Security
The group is led by Prof. Olaf Maennel. It is a very young and active group, started around 2013. The main interests of the group are in intrusion detection, testing security policies, and security simulation exercises. They have gained a European FP7 project on E-Crime. The group is still establishing itself in research and its activities are promising. The number and quality of publications is still limited and should be increased. This can be done since the leader of the group is well cited. Assessment: The panel judges the research to be of high international level. The overall evaluation of the group is good.
University of Tartu:
4.6.10. Research Group: Institute of Computer Science: Cryptography and Theoretical Computer Science
This group represents a number of subunits, with 6 topics led by 5 lead PIs (Sven Laur, Helger Lipmaa, Vitaly Skachek, Dirk Oliver Theis, Dominique Unruh). The group was restructured in 2011 with the recruitment of Unruh and Lipmaa. The group addresses six key research topics, namely classical cryptography, quantum cryptography, coding theory, combinatorics and algorithms, security, and verification of cryptography. All topics are related to computer security.
The research highlights include quantum proofs of knowledge, privacy-preserving data-mining, efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, communication complexity and the rank of matrices, and permutation codes. The group claims 8 level 1.1 publications, which seems a bit low. However, it is also a bit misleading since their list of 30 best papers includes 11 articles in top or at least internationally well recognized journals (J Cryptology, European J Combinatorics, IEEE Tr Information Theory, IEEE J selected areas in communication, Theoretical Computer Science, Journal of Computer Security, Bioinformatics, European J. Operations Research), besides 7 papers in the very best conferences (FOCS, Crypto, Eurocrypt, ICALP). Remaining top 30 items are papers in more specialized cryptography and security venues like ACM CCS, PKC, SCN, CSF, Eurocomb. Publication rate of top level papers has increased significantly over the evaluation period.
Many of the students (10+) are working in related industrial SMEs such as Cybernetica. They are contributing to several practical applications such as e-voting. The group is recommended to keep its current high quality and volume of output, and to develop some additional internationally financed projects. Based on the evidence, panel judges the research to be of high international level. Because of the strong upward trend the overall evaluation of the group is excellent.
Links:
http://www.etag.ee/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Evaluation_raport2015veeb.pdf