Strachey Lecture - Professor Srđan Čapkun

Title: Hardening Digital Infrastructure: Resilient Positioning and Sovereign Smartphone Architectures

Abstract:

Recent global events have underscored how failures in isolation, redundancy, and control can jeopardize essential digital functions. A critical challenge remains: how do we harden systems for higher resiliency, personal and societal control while maintaining compatibility with existing ecosystems? In this talk, I explore this in two example settings.

First, I address the systemic vulnerabilities of current satellite positioning systems. By integrating novel protocols hardened at the physical layer, I demonstrate a path toward a robust, feature-rich, wide-area positioning infrastructure.

Second, I introduce a novel security architecture that brings true digital sovereignty to the modern smartphone. This deployable design allows users to run "several phones in one" (e.g. isolating private and business environments), ensuring that sensitive applications and critical I/O remain protected even if the underlying OS is compromised. Ultimately, these designs return control to users and organizations, fostering a more resilient and free environment for digital innovation.

Bio:

Srdjan Capkun (Srđan Čapkun) is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Scientific Director of the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC). His research spans system and network security, with a particular focus on trusted computing and wireless security, including secure positioning.

He has co-founded several spin-offs, including 3db Access (acquired by Infineon in 2023), one of the pioneers of secure distance measurement, and Soverli, which develops sovereign smartphone architectures. He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE and was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016 for his work on securing wireless positioning. He holds a Dipl. Ing. from the University of Split and a Ph.D. from EPFL.

The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management

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Host or Publisher Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford