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Alexander Dax

Ph.D. Student
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
alexander (at) dax.saarland


About Me

I’m a Ph.D. student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, supervised by Prof. Dr. Cas Cremers. The main focus of my research is the theory and practice of automated reasoning, aimed at developing techniques that assist us in solving computationally hard problems such as the verification of security protocols, software, and hardware. Together with Aurora Naska and Cas Cremers I have created and analyzed an extensive formal model of DMTF’s SPDM protocol to enable infrastrucuture security. With Dr. Robert Künnemann I have proposed novel techniques to verify rule-based risk assessment techniques using methods from the Symbolic Model of Cryptography.

Before starting my Ph.D. journey, I did a Master (MSc) in Computer Science under Prof. Dr. Cas Cremers and Dr. Robert Künnemann at Saarland University, Germany, Saarbrücken. There I also finished my Bachelor (BSc) in Cybersecurity under Prof. Michael Backes and Dr. Robert Künnemann.

Research Interests

Publications

  1. CCS
    Keeping Up with the KEMs: Stronger Security Notions for KEMs and Automated Analysis of KEM-based Protocols
    Cas Cremers, Alexander Dax, Niklas Medinger
    ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024.
    PDF Extended Code BibTex
  2. Usenix
    Automated Analysis of Protocols that use Authenticated Encryption: How Subtle AEAD Differences can impact Protocol Security
    Cas Cremers, Alexander Dax, Charlie Jacomme, Mang Zhao
    USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX), 2023.
    PDF Extended Slides Code BibTex
    Distinguished Paper Award
  3. Usenix
    Formal Analysis of SPDM: Security Protocol and Data Model version 1.2
    Cas Cremers, Alexander Dax, Aurora Naska
    USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX), 2023.
    PDF Extended Slides Code BibTex
  4. Usenix
    Hash Gone Bad: Automated discovery of protocol attacks that exploit hash function weaknesses
    Vincent Cheval, Cas Cremers, Alexander Dax, Lucca Hirschi, Charlie Jacomme, Steve Kremer
    USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX), 2023.
    PDF Extended Slides Code BibTex
    Distinguished Paper Award
  5. CSF
    On the Soundness of Infrastructure Adversaries
    Alexander Dax, Robert Künnemann
    IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2021.
    PDF Extended Slides Video BibTex
  6. CSF
    How To Wrap It Up - A Formally Verified Proposal for the use of Authenticated Wrapping in PKCS#11
    Michael Backes, Alexander Dax, Robert Künnemann, Sven Tangermann
    IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2019.
    PDF Extended Slides BibTex

Teaching