Information Security Research at HSE MIEM

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What sets information security apart as a research focus? What projects is HSE MIEM’s Department of Cyber-Physical Systems Information Security currently carrying out? How does research informs teaching? Fedor Ivanov, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Cyber-Physical Systems Information Security, has answered these and other questions for the HSE LooK.

Fedor Ivanov

We focus on those aspects of mathematics that are closely related to communication and information theories as well as the theory of data transmission, storage and processing. There is a difference between secure data processing in information security and cryptography, and we take this into account in our degree programmes and research.

Research Projects

Our department is quite young; it was formed in 2019 and so far, the team is not that big, although our research interests are rather wide. Our telecom group is engaged in both fundamental and applied research in contemporary error-control coding systems—low-density parity-check codes (LDPC), convolutional and polar codes.

Our team proposed a new low-resource algorithm for decoding polar codes, which today surpasses all known analogues in its complexity and efficiency

We also do research on effective decoding algorithms, including those based on neural networks, and have already received new outcomes, which we will definitely publish and patent in the near future.

Over the last two years, we have become engaged in research on post-quantum cryptography. It has been proven that the algorithms that are currently used in the banking sector—asymmetric encryption algorithms, digital signatures—will be immediately compromised as soon as sufficiently powerful quantum computers appear.

Although the prospect of quantum computers’ emergence is rather distant, a potential vulnerability within such systems already exists

Therefore, we are developing methods that will encrypt data based on the assumption that quantum computers are a given (one of the existing ideas is the McEliece cryptosystem). However, the main problem of code-based cryptographic systems is the large length of cryptographic keys. Thus, the efforts of most researchers are aimed at reducing it to the length of conventional algebraic cryptosystems.

Our team proposed a new approach, which is based on a fundamentally new key structure. It was already presented at EUROCRYPT 2020, one of the leading conferences in cryptography, and attracted considerable interest in the scientific community.

Another branch of our research are digital watermarks and steganography

The lead researcher in this field is the head of the department - Oleg Evsyutin. Digital watermarks are used to copyright digital content. They can check the ownership of a copyright or hide certain data in digital content that would let one say that a certain file or video belongs to a certain copyright holder. Oleg Evsyutin is also researching digital steganography, or covert data transmission through pictures—although they do not visually differ from the original ones, the modified pictures can transfer some hidden data. This type of unnoticeable data transmission is used when it is impossible to create a secure data transmission channel. These all are a part of information cybersecurity.

We are also engaged in commercial specialized application projects concerning fifth generation (5G) communication standards, and soon we will be looking at prospective 6G standards

Since some tasks require knowledge of physics, especially with respect to 6G+, this imposes restrictions on data transfer rate and may cause certain delays in the programming. Nevertheless, certainly, it is very useful that MIEM has excellent specialists who are engaged in research on quantum transmission. Through our commercial and industrial projects, over the past year, we have submitted two patent applications and they are currently being reviewed by respective offices.

Information Security Courses

The department runs Bachelor's and Master's programmes in information security. The undergraduate programme trains specialists who can operate existing systems and, in some ways, improve them. Some of our current students are already employed in the banking sector and consulting agencies while others have turned to AI and computer vision.

Our graduate programme prepares specialists who are engaged in research and thus able to not only perform deployment of information security systems at enterprises and ensure data security, but also see what can be qualitatively improved in those systems, or even create new ones. Since we have strong connections with industry, our students engage in commercial research for large telecommunications firms.

We primarily focus on training ‘civilian’ information security professionals with extensive knowledge of contemporary telecommunications technologies and standards, and who are ready to deploy, update and even create secure information systems of various scales

In addition to mathematics, our students take applied courses—Systems and Software Engineering, Telecommunication Systems and Network Security—which blend fundamental mathematics with modern informatics (including a lot of programming languages) and show how theory meets practice in terms of information protection.

We actively encourage the development of students’ interest in science through seminars that cover both classic problems as well as completely new approaches in telecommunication technologies

As projects and term papers have to be aligned with the current agenda in telecommunications and information security, such an approach helps them widen their horizons and get a feel for the “adult science”, and perhaps understand that science is what they want to do in life. I am convinced that it is only the alignment between basic science and modern technologies that can lead to a “technological breakthrough”, especially if it concerns such a complex and science-intensive field as information security.

Among our immediate plans is to go global and launch joint English-taught programmes in information security for international students. Apart from that, our staff are involved in a large number of continuing education programmes, which are in high demand on the part of various external clients.