Bachelor Seminar: Logic for Security (LfS, WiSe 2026/27)

Instructor: Dr. Michael Kirsten

Overview

In this Bachelor's seminar, we investigate the theoretical foundations of security through the lens of formal logic, emphasizing how rigorous reasoning frameworks can express, analyze, and validate fundamental security properties. A central theme is the explicit treatment of trust assumptions and attacker capabilities, which form the basis of any meaningful security argument. Students explore how logical systems provide precise languages for modeling knowledge, belief, authority, and information flow in adversarial settings. The seminar examines how these logics capture subtle distinctions between what agents know what they are allowed to do, and what an attacker can infer or manipulate.

By formalizing threat models and trust boundaries, participants learn to reason about system behavior under varying assumptions and to identify where security guarantees depend on idealizations or unverified premises. Through theoretical analysis and selected case studies, the seminar highlights how logic enables the systematic derivation of security properties, the detection of flawed assumptions, and the construction of proofs that remain valid even in the presence of powerful adversaries. Students gain a deep understanding of how formal reasoning shapes the conceptual foundations of secure system design.

Preliminary Knowledge

A successful participation in the lecture "Logik und Diskrete Strukturen" or similar lectures is highly recommended for this seminar. For some seminar topics, a successful participation in the lecture "Formale Sprachen und Komplexität" or similar lectures is also recommended.

Organization

There will be a mandatory session at the beginning of the semester where a brief motivation and the organization of the course will be presented in detail, as well as the list of topics. You will then have time to send your topic preferences until 19 October.

Subsequently, there will be another two mandatory sessions where the instructor will introduce some common terminology, concepts, and objectives, and questions can be discussed. This lays important groundwork so that we have a common understanding of the seminar's context and objectives. Further, any potential conflicts in your topic preferences will be resolved in the beginning of the session on 20 October so that students' topics will be allocated at that time.

After you had some time to familiarize yourself with your topic, there will be a mandatory session of short lightning talks where each of you gives a two-slide summary within two to three minutes of your topic.

At the end of the semester, there will be one to three mandatory sessions for the seminar talks. In between, there will be no scheduled meetings, but you can schedule individual meetings with the instructor for questions on your topics, preferably during the regular seminar's time slot. Moreover, you are expected to hand in a short draft of your planned seminar paper until 16 December and participate in a review process until 21 December that will help you for your seminar paper.

Please register for the Moodle course.

Examination

The examination consists of two parts:

• A written seminar paper on your chosen topic (60 % of the grade), the length of which must be between 7 000 and 14 000 characters.
• A talk (40 % of the grade) of 25 minutes presentation plus 5 minutes discussion. The talk should cover some but possibly not all things written about in the seminar paper. Particular attention should be given to the feedback and questions received after your talk.

Submissions can be either in English or in German, and the language of the talk and the language of the paper may differ depending on your preference.

Schedule

Material

The slides of the in-person meetings will be uploaded here.

Topics

A list of suggested topics will be uploaded here. However, topic suggestions by you are very welcome, yet need approval by the instructor.