With increasing digitization, the number of long-lived systems and services increases rapidly. For example, digital archives such as genomic databases will have to operate for many decades or even centuries. The protection of such long-lived systems against security risks is indispensable.

Most of the security technology used today appears to be inappropriate for protecting long-lived systems. This is particularly true for cryptography. Keys chosen today will be too short in the future or they may leak over time. Researchers may find new attacks against schemes that are considered secure today. Therefore, the protection of long-lived digital systems is an important scientific and technological problem.

Several researchers have proposed partial solutions. For example, there are security models for long-lived systems; there is quantum key distribution and one-time pad encryption, which offer information theoretic protection of the confidentiality of data in transit; there are time-stamp-based solutions that ensure long-term integrity of data in archives. However, there is no comprehensive solution of the problem yet.

The workshop will bring together researchers from the relevant technology and application areas to discuss important scientific challenges that need to be addressed in order to find theoretically sound and practical solutions that provide protection of long-lived systems. Currently, the following speakers are confirmed.

• Ahto Buldas (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia)
• Claude Crépeau (McGill University, Canada)
• Nicolas Gisin (Université de Genève, Switzerland)
• Michael Hange (formerly President BSI, Germany)
• Jean-Pierre Hubaux (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Norbert Lütkenhaus (University of Waterloo, Canada)
• Olivier Pereira (UCL, Belgium)
• Jörn Müller-Quade (KIT, Germany)
• Rei Safavi-Naini (University of Calgary, Canada)
• Jörg Schwenk (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)

The workshop is organized by Johannes Buchmann, member of the Leopoldina, Denise Demirel, and Matthias Geihs.

Foto: Oleksiy Mark - fotolia.com