Section: Research Program

Our perspective

For many aspects of our daily lives, we rely heavily on computer systems, many of which are based on massively interconnected devices that support a population of interacting and cooperating entities. As these systems become more open and complex, accidental and intentional failures become much more frequent and serious. We believe that the purpose of attacks against these systems is expressed at a high level (compromise of sensitive data, unavailability of services). However, these attacks are often carried out at a very low level (exploitation of vulnerabilities by malicious code, hardware attacks).

The CIDRE team is specialized in the defense of computer systems. We argue that to properly protect these systems we must have a complete understanding of the attacker's concrete capabilities. In other words, to defend properly we must understand the attack.

The CIDRE team therefore strives to have a global expertise in information systems: from hardware to distributed architectures. Our objective is to highlight security issues and propose preventive or reactive countermeasures in widely used and privacy-friendly systems.