Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) is a protocol that allows a security chip embedded in a platform such as laptop to authenticate itself as a genuine chip.  Different authentications are not linkeable, thus the protocol protects the privacy of the platform. The first DAA protocol was proposed by Brickell, Chen, and Camenisch and was standardized in 2004 by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). Implementations of this protocols were rather slow because it is based on RSA. Later, alternative and faster protocols were proposed based on elliptic curves. Recently the specification by the TCG was updated to allow for DAA protocols based on elliptic curves. Unfortunately, the new standard does not allow for provably secure DAA protocols. In this talk, we will review some of the history of DAA and  then discuss the latest protocols, security models, and finally a provably secure realization of DAA based on elliptic curves.

Quantization is the study of the interface between commutative and
noncommutative geometry. There are myriad approaches to it, mostly presented
as ad hoc recipes. I shall discuss the motivating ideas, and the relations
between some of the methods, especially the relation between 'deformation'
and 'geometric' quantization.

The Morita Frobenius number of an algebra is the number of Morita equivalence classes of its Frobenius twists. Morita Frobenius numbers were introduced by Kessar in 2004 in the context of Donovan’s Conjecture in block theory. I will present the latest results of a project in which we aim to calculate the Morita Frobenius numbers of the blocks of quasi-simple finite groups. I will also discuss the importance of a recent result of Bonnafe-Dat-Rouquier for our methods, and explain the relationship between Morita Frobenius numbers and Donovan’s Conjecture. 

Instanton bundles were introduced by Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin and Manin in the late 1970s as the holomorphic counterparts, via twistor
theory, to anti-self-dual connections (a.k.a. instantons) on the sphere S^4. We will revise some recent results regarding some of the basic
geometrical features of their moduli spaces, and on its possible degenerations. We will describe the singular loci of instanton sheaves,
and how these lead to new irreducible components of the moduli space of stable sheaves on the projective space.