Dr. Erik-Oliver Blass

Dr. Erik-Oliver Blass
Senior Research Scientist, Airbus
Airbus Senior Expert for Applied Cryptography

Email: erik AT erik-blass.de

About

I focus on applied cryptography and the design of new cryptographic protocols. My research bridges the gap between theory of cryptography and practice. I produce solutions which do not only have provable security guarantees, but are practical and efficient in the real-world. Cryptographic techniques that I have designed are deployed in aircraft such as the Airbus A320, the highest-selling commercial aircraft family. I serve as the Airbus Senior Expert for applied cryptography.

In reverse chronological order, my major contributions so far have been in the design of

Protocols for Secure Computation
Secure logging
Hidden-Volume encryption
Oblivious RAM
Security and privacy of RFID systems
Security in sensor networks

As a principal investigator, my own research projects have been funded by NSF and VISA Inc. My work is published in top venues (such as CCS or NDSS) and has been distinguished with several best paper awards.

Before joining Airbus’ Cyber Research Center, I was research assistant professor at Northeastern University, Boston USA, and senior researcher at EURECOM, France. I hold PhD (summa cum laude) and MS (Dipl.-Inform.) in computer science from University of Karlsruhe in Germany. My thesis was awarded with the prize for the best security research thesis by Germany’s data security organization GDD in 2007.

Publications

Also see Google Scholar or DBLP.

Conferences and Workshops

1.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, “Private Collaborative Data Cleaning via Non-Equi PSI”, Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’23), San Francisco, USA, 2023 (to appear)
2.: Florian Kerschbaum, Erik-Oliver Blass, Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, “Faster Secure Comparisons with Offline Phase for Efficient Private Set Intersection”, Proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’23), San Diego, USA, 2023 (to appear)
3.: Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, Ellis Fenske, “Blind My – Robust Stalking Prevention in Apple’s Find My Network”, Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS’23), Lausanne, Switzerland, 2023 (to appear)
4.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, “Mixed-Technique Multi-Party Computations Composed of Two-Party Computations”, Proceedings of European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS’22), Copenhagen, Denmark, ISBN 978-3-031-17142-0, 2022
5.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, Travis Mayberry, “Iterative Oblivious Pseudo-Random Functions and Applications”, Proceedings of ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS’22), Nagasaki, Japan, ISBN 978-1-4503-9140-5, 2022
6.: Marinos Vomvas, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “SELEST: Secure Elevation Estimation of Drones Using Multi-Party Computation”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec’21), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4503-8349-3
7.: Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, Thomas Humphries, Bailey Kacsmar, Simeon Krastnikov, Nils Lukas, John A. Premkumar, Masoumeh Shafieinejad, Simon Oya, Florian Kerschbaum, Erik-Oliver Blass, “Practical Over-Threshold Multi-Party Private Set Intersection”, Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’20), Austin, USA, ISBN 978-1-4503-8858-0, 2020
8.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, “BOREALIS: Building Block for Sealed Bid Auctions on Blockchains”, Proceedings of ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS’20), Taipei, Taiwan, ISBN 978-1-4503-6750-9, 2020
9.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, “Strain: A Secure Auction for Blockchains”, Proceedings of European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS’18), Barcelona, Spain, ISBN 978-3-319-99072-9, 2018
10.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “Secure Logging with Crash Tolerance”, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS’17), Las Vegas, USA, ISBN 978-1-5386-0683-4, 2017
11.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Travis Mayberry, Guevara Noubir, “Multi-Client Oblivious RAM secure against Malicious Servers”, Proceedings of Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS’17), Kanazawa, Japan, ISBN 978-3-319-61203-4, 2017
12.: Florian Kerschbaum, Erik-Oliver Blass, Tomas Sander, “WISCS’16: ACM Workshop on Information Sharing and Collaborative Security”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’16), pp. 1877-1878, Vienna, Austria, ISBN 978-1-4503-4139-4
13.: Tarik Moataz, Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, “Constant Communication ORAM with Small Blocksize”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS’15), pp. 862-873, Denver, USA, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4503-3832-5
14.: Aldo Cassola, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “Authenticating Privately over Public Wi-Fi Hotspots”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS’15), pp. 1346-1357, Denver, USA, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4503-3832-5
15.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Travis Mayberry, Guevara Noubir, “Practical Forward-Secure Range and Sort Queries with Update-Oblivious Linked Lists”, Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS’15), pp. 81-98, Philadelphia, USA, 2015
16.: Tarik Moataz, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “Recursive Trees for Practical ORAM”, Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS’15), 115-134, Philadelphia, USA, 2015
17.: Triet D. Vo-Huu, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “EPiC: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Counting for MapReduce”, Proceedings of Conference on Networked Systems (NETYS’15), pp. 426–443, Rabat, Morocco, 2015
18.: Tao Jin, Triet D. Vo-Huu, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “BaPu: Efficient and Practical Bunching of Access Point Uplinks”, Proceedings of Conference on Networked Systems (NETYS’15), pp. 337–353, Rabat, Morocco, 2015
19.: Tarik Moataz, Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, Agnes Hui Chan, “Resizeable Tree-Based Oblivious RAM”, Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC’15), pp. 147-167, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-47853-0
20.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Travis Mayberry, Guevara Noubir, Kaan Onarlioglu, “Toward Robust Hidden Volumes using Write-Only Oblivious RAM”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS’14), pp. 203-212, Scottsdale, USA, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4503-2957-6
21.: Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, Agnes Hui Chan, “Efficient Private File Retrieval by Combining ORAM and PIR”, Proceedings of 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS ’14), pp. 1-11, San Diego, USA, 2014, Distinguished Paper Award
22.: Jonas Zaddach, Anil Kurmus, Davide Balzarotti, Erik-Oliver Blass, Aurelien Francillon, Travis Goodspeed, Moitrayee Gupta, Ioannis Koltsidas, “Implementation and Implications of a Stealth Hard-Drive Backdoor”, Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’13), pp. 279-288, New Orleans, USA, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4503-2015-3, Best Paper Award
23.: Triet D. Vo-Huu, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “Countering High-Power Jammers using Mixed Mechanical and Software Beam-Forming”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec’13), pp. 31-42, Budapest, Hungary, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4503-1998-0, Runner Up Best Paper Award
24.: Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, Agnes Hui Chan, “PIRMAP: Efficient Private Information Retrieval for MapReduce”, Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC’13), pp. 371-385, Okinawa, Japan, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-39883-4
25.: Erik-Oliver Blass, William Robertson, “TRESOR-HUNT: Attacking CPU-Bound Encryption”, Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’12), pp. 71-78, Orlando, USA, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4503-1312-4
26.: Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva, “T-MATCH: Privacy-Preserving Item Matching for Storage-Only RFID Tags”, Proceedings of RFID Security (RFIDSec’12), LNCS 7739, pp. 76-95, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2012
27.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Roberto Di Pietro, Refik Molva, Melek Onen, “PRISM - Privacy-Preserving Search in MapReduce”, Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS’12), pp. 180-200, Vigo, Spain, 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-31679-1
28.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Refik Molva, “PPS: Privacy-Preserving Statistics using RFID Tags”, Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Data Security and Privacy in wireless Networks (D-SPAN’12), pp. 1-6, San Francisco, USA, 2012
29.: Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva, “CHECKER: On-site checking in RFID-based supply chains”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec’12), pp. 173-184, Tucson, USA, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4503-1265-3
30.: Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva, “ROTIV: RFID Ownership Transfer with Issuer Verification”, Proceedings of RFID Security (RFIDSec’11), pp. 163-182, Amherst, USA, 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-25285-3
31.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Refik Molva, “TRACKER: Security and Privacy for RFID-based Supply Chains”, Proceedings of 18th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS ’11), pp. 455-472, San Diego, USA, 2011, ISBN 1-891562-32-0
32.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Thorsten Strufe, “PSP: Private and Secure Payment with RFID”, Proceedings of ACM workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES’09), pp. 51-60, Chicago, USA, 2009, ISBN 978-1-60558-892-6
33.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Guevara Noubir, Abdullatif Shikfa, “The F_f-Family of Protocols for RFID-Privacy and Authentication”, Proceedings of RFID Security (RFIDSec’09), pp. 1-15, Leuven, Belgium, 2009
34.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “Tailored security and safety for pervasive computing”, Open Research Problems in Network Security (iNetSec’09), Zurich, Switzerland, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 309, pp. 85-92, 2009, ISSN 1868-4238
35.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva, “New directions in RFID security”, Open Research Problems in Network Security (iNetSec’09), Zurich, Switzerland, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 309, pp. 76-84, 2009, ISSN 1868-4238
36.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Joachim Wilke, Martina Zitterbart, “Relaxed Authenticity for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm’08), pp. 1-10, Istanbul, Turkey, 2008, ISBN 9781605582412
37.: Joachim Wilke, Frank Werner, Markus Bestehorn, Zinaida Benenson, Simon Kellner, Erik-Oliver Blass, “Vergleichbarkeit von Ansätzen zur Netzwerkanalyse in drahtlosen Sensornetzen, 7. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch “Drahtlose Sensornetze”, pp. 97-100, Berlin, Germany, 2008
38.: Simon Kellner, Mario Pink, Detlev Meier, Erik-Oliver Blass, “Towards a Realistic Energy Model for Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Wireless On demand Network Systems and Services (WONS’08), pp. 97-100, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, 2008, ISBN 9781424419586
39.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “An Efficient Key Establishment Scheme for Secure Aggregating Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’06), pp. 303-310, Taipei, Taiwan, 2006, ISBN 1-59593-272-0
40.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Lars Tiede, Martina Zitterbart, “An Energy-Efficient and Reliable Mechanism for Data Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of Third International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS’06), pp. 211-216, Chicago, USA, 2006, ISBN 0-9743611-3-5
41.: Artur Hecker, Erik-Oliver Blass, Houda Labiod, “A Decentralized Management and Access Control for 802.1X WLANs “, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Personal Wireless Communications (PWC’05), Colmar, France, 2005, ISBN 1-86094-582-1
42.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “Towards Acceptable Public-Key Encryption in Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of ACM International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing (IWUCS’05), pp. 88-93, Miami, USA, 2005, ISBN 972-8865-24-4
43.: Hans-Joachim Hof, Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “Secure Overlay for Service Centric Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of European Workshop on Security in Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks (ESAS’04), pp. 125-138, Heidelberg, Germany, 2004, ISBN 3540243968
44.: Hans-Joachim Hof, Erik-Oliver Blass, Thomas Fuhrmann, Martina Zitterbart, “Design of a Secure Distributed Service Directory for Wireless Sensornetworks”, Proceedings of European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN’04), pp. 172-187, Berlin, Germany, 2004, ISBN 978-3-540-20825-9

Journals

45.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “Forward Security with Crash Recovery for Secure Logs”, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 2023 (to appear)
46.: Triet D. Vo-Huu, Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, “EPiC: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Counting for MapReduce”, Springer Journal of Computing, 2018, ISSN: 0010-485X
47.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Thorsten Strufe, “PSP: Private and Secure Payment with RFID”, Computer Communications, Vol. 36, pp. 468-480, 2013, ISSN 0140-3664, 2013
48.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Guevara Noubir, Abdullatif Shikfa, “The F_f-Family of Protocols for RFID-Privacy and Authentication”, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), Vol. 8(3), pp. 466-480, 2011, ISSN 1545-5971
49.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva, “Schutz von Lieferketten mit RFID-Tags”, DIGMA, Vol 11(2), pp. 76-79, 2011, ISSN 1424-9944
50.: Zinaida Benenson, Erik-Oliver Blass, Felix C. Freiling, “Attacker Models for Wireless Sensor Networks”, IT - Information Technology, Vol. 52(6), pp. 320-324, 2010. ISSN 1611-2776
51.: Jochim Wilke, Erik-Oliver Blass, Felix Freiling, Martina Zitterbart, “A framework for probabilistic, authentic aggregation in wireless sensor networks”, PIK, Vol. 32(2), pp. 116-126, 2009, ISSN 0930-5157

Books and Book Chapters

52.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Benjamin Fabian, Matthias Fischmann, Seda Gürses, “Security in Sensor Networks”, in “Algorithms for Sensor and Ad Hoc Networks”, D. Wagner and R. Wattenhofer (Ed.), pp. 305-323, Springer Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-74990-5
53.: Erik-Oliver Blass, “Sicherer, aggregierender Datentransport in drahtlosen Sensornetzen”, 238 pp., Dissertation, Universitätsverlag Karlsruhe, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86644-142-2
54.: Roland Bless, Stefan Mink, Erik-Oliver Blass, Michael Conrad, Hans-Joachim Hof, Kendy Kutzner, Marcus Schöller, “Sichere Netzwerkkommunikation”, 582 pp., Springer Verlag, June 2005, ISBN 3-540-21845-9

Poster

55.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Jens Horneber, Martina Zitterbart, “Analyzing Data Prediction in Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of IEEE 67th VTC Spring Conference, pp. 86-87, Marina Bay, Singapore, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4244-1645-5
56.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Joachim Wilke, Martina Zitterbart, “A Security-Energy Trade-Off for Authentic Aggregation in Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON’06), pp. 135-137, Washington D.C., USA, 2006, ISBN 142440732X
57.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Michael Conrad, Martina Zitterbart, “A Tree-Based Approach for Secure Key Distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks (REALWSN’05), Stockholm, Sweden, 2005

Demos

58.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Refik Molva, “Demo: The F_f Hardware Prototype for Privacy-Preserving RFID Authentication”, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’11), pp. 737-740, Chicago, USA, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4503-0948-6
59.: Joachim Wilke, Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “ESAWN-NR: Authentic Aggregation and Non-Repudiation in Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proceedings of International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS’08), Kanazawa, Japan, 2008, ISBN 978-4-907764-31-9

Technical Reports

60.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Zinaida Benenson, “Das ZeuS-Angreifermodell”, Technical Report, No. TM-2008-1, Universität Karlsruhe, February 2008, ISSN 1613-849X
61.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Martina Zitterbart, “Efficient Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Wireless Sensor Networks”, Technical Report No. TM-2005-1, 2005
62.: Erik-Oliver Blass, “Analyse, Verifikation und Realisierung kryptographischer Protokolle für flexible Zugriffe auf medizinische Datenbanken”, Diploma thesis, European Institute for System Security, Universität Karlsruhe, 2001
63.: Erik-Oliver Blass, “Evaluierung von Chipkartensystemen für HUELKA”, Bachelor thesis, European Institute for System Security, Universität Karlsruhe, January 2000

Offensive Work

64.: Erik-Oliver Blass and Weikeng Chen, CVE-2018-6594, PyCrypto’s semantic security of Elgamal, 2018
65.: Erik-Oliver Blass and Weikeng Chen, CVE-2018-6829, LibGCrypt’s semantic security of Elgamal, 2018
66.: Roderick Asselineau and Erik-Oliver Blass, “Implementation of the key recovery attack against GEA-1 keys”, https://github.com/airbus-seclab/GEA1_break, 2021

Other Publications

67.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Stephan Marwedel, “Secure logging with syslog-ng: Forward integrity and confidentiality of system logs”, Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM’20), 2020
68.: Joachim Wilke, Frank Werner, Markus Bestehorn, Zinaida Benenson, Simon Kellner, Erik-Oliver Blass, “Vergleichbarkeit von Ansätzen zur Netzwerkanalyse in drahtlosen Sensornetzen”, 7. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch ”Drahtlose Sensornetze“, pp. 97–100, Berlin, Germany, 2008
69.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Holger Junker, Martina Zitterbart, “Effiziente Implementierung von Public-Key Algorithmen für Sensornetze”, Lecture Notes in Informatics: Informatik 2005, Vol. 2, GI, pp. 140–144, Bonn, Germany, 2005, ISBN 3-88579-397-0
70.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Hans-Joachim Hof, Martina Zitterbart, “S-CAN: Sicheres Overlay für Sensornetze”, 2. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch “Drahtlose Sensornetze”, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2004
71.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Hans-Joachim Hof, Bernhard Hurler, Martina Zitterbart, “Erste Erfahrungen mit der Karlsruher Sensornetz-Plattform”, GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch “Drahtlose Sensornetze”, Berlin, Germany, 2003
72.: Stefan Dieterle, Peer Wichmann, Erik-Oliver Blass, Jochen Breuer, Rolf Kampffmeyer, Axel Rengstorf, “Sicherheit für die Top-Level Domain .de durch Secure DNS”, FZI — Forschungszentrum Informatik, Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), 2003
73.: Erik-Oliver Blass, “Analyse, Verifikation und Realisierung kryptographischer Protokolle für flexible Zugriffe auf medizinische Datenbanken”, Master Thesis, European Institute for System Security, Universität Karlsruhe, 2001
74.: Erik-Oliver Blass, “Evaluierung von Chipkartensystemen für HUELKA”, Bachelor Thesis, European Institute for System Security, Universität Karlsruhe, January 2000
75.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Uwe Forgber, “Ein generisches Werkzeug zur Anbindung von Wissensressourcen an internetbasierte Planungsumgebungen”, 11. Forum Bauinformatik, Darmstadt, Germany, 1999

Patents

76.: Artur Hecker, Erik-Oliver Blass, Houda Labiod, EP2396932B1: “Device and a method for communicating in a network”, granted
77.: Erik-Oliver Blass, EP3163789: “Forward-Secure Crash-Resilient Logging Device”, granted
78.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, EP3462668A1, US020190109712A1, “Plaintext Equivalence Proof Techniques in Communication Systems”, granted
79.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Simon Bourne, Paddy Francis, “Secure remote computer system”, filed
80.: Erik-Oliver Blass, Guevara Noubir, EU3697021, US11106549, “Secure and encrypted logging systems and methods with data recovery”, granted