Obituary - Aleksandr Lenin

Aleksandr Lenin was a valued colleague, who joined Cybernetica in 2013 as a Junior Researcher, and continued his career as a Researcher after obtaining his PhD in 2015. He conducted extensive research on security technologies that had a direct impact on the work that Cybernetica carries out.

The topic he focused on in his research was the use of attack trees in the security analysis of complex, heterogeneous systems. It’s a difficult task to properly understand such systems in general and their security in particular - by describing and numerically characterising the possible tactics of an adversary, attack trees can bring some order into this. Aleksandr's work focused on using attack trees to describe different kinds of attackers. It improved the efficiency of the use of the technique from both the computational and analytical point of view, as well as clarified certain theoretical aspects of attack trees in demonstrating the infeasibility of attacks.

In Cybernetica, we applied techniques researched by Aleksandr regularly when, for example, analysing the security of different aspects of Estonian e-governance solutions, as well as the security of the systems of our customers.

Aleksandr was also interested in other security technologies, particularly cryptography. He did research on the confidentiality aspects of Named Data Networking (NDN) - a possible Future Internet architecture, related to Content-Centric Networking. As this architecture does not have the same notions of connections between participants, the sensible techniques for confidentiality are different and based on various cryptographic primitives. Aleksandr studied and evaluated the use of attribute-based encryption (ABE) for this purpose, suggesting which aspects of different ABE primitives are more or less important in the use cases of NDN.

Aleksandr also participated in the development of the SplitKey technology. Additionally, he developed an analytical tool for combining cross-dependencies described for different services, systems, and organisations with a focus on providers of life-critical services.

Aleksandr strongly believed in the Cybernetica mission - that we should create a smarter and securer world. With his research efforts, he contributed extensively to the advancement of the Estonian e-government system, and created value for our customers around the world.

Aleksandr, you will be missed.

Cybernetica AS