SAL’s .hidden CTF team is placed second in Romania

The .hidden CTF team, founded by 4 passionate SAL students less than 3 months ago, has gained momentum placing second country wise on the global leaderboard on CTFtime for 2023 and 449th out of 23,152 worldwide.

.hidden has been on a streak in recent CTF competitions and are planning to attend more over the summer:

If you are interested to join their team, feel free to contact them at contact@dothidden.xyz.

Unbreakable Romania – Teams – Winners

A team of the University of Bucharest placed first in the Competition Unbreakable Romania (season spring-summer 2021). Congratulations to Dragos Albastroiu, Mihail Feraru (undergraduates at Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science), and Andrei Ciobanu (master student enrolled at our Security and Applied Logic master program) for finishing the team competition on the first place! More information available here.

Unbreakable Romania – Winners

The University of Bucharest is placed in the top for the best score at the Individual Competition Unbreakable Romania (season spring-summer 2021). Congratulations to Dragos Albastroiu, undergraduate at Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, for finishing the individual competition on the first place! More information available here.

Active Defense in Cybersecurity

Title: Active Defense in Cybersecurity

Speaker: Sergiu Bogdan Meseșan & Andreea Drugă, Cybersecurity Specialists at ENEA


Agenda:

  • Active Defense Mechanisms – Notions, principles and Active Defense mechanisms (ca.1h)
  • Practical Application for Honeypot Analytics and Attacks Data Collection – Presentation of a platform implemented by ENEA specially for this lecture, a practical demo of Active Defense (ca.1h)
  • Active Defense DIY – Workshop installation, running, Internet access for a Honeypot type VM using an open source platform (Telekom Tpot CE) (ca.1h-1.5h)

For the students interested to attend the meeting: please contact Ruxandra Olimid (ruxandra.olimid@fmi.unibuc.ro)

Kernelization, Proof Complexity and Social Choice

Title: Kernelization, Proof Complexity and Social Choice

Speaker: Gabriel Istrate (West University of Timișoara)


Abstract:

We display an application of the notions of kernelization and data reduction from parameterized complexity to proof complexity: Specifically, we show that the existence of data reduction rules for a parameterized problem having (a) a small-length reduction chain, and (b) small-size (extended) Frege proofs certifying the soundness of reduction steps implies the existence of subexponential size (extended) Frege proofs for propositional formalizations of the given problem. We apply our result to infer the existence of subexponential Frege and extended Frege proofs for a variety of problems. Improving earlier results of Aisenberg et al. (ICALP 2015), we show that propositional formulas expressing (a stronger form of) the Kneser-Lovasz Theorem have polynomial size Frege proofs for each constant value of the parameter k. Previously only quasipolynomial bounds were known (and only for the ordinary Kneser-Lovasz Theorem). Another notable application of our framework is to impossibility results in computational social choice: we show that, for any fixed number of agents, propositional translations of the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility theorems have subexponential size Frege proofs.

This is joint work with Cosmin Bonchiș and Adrian Crăciun.