This paper firstly reports a security flaw and a way to fix it detected in a multi-coupon system presented by Liu et al. in a paper published in 2017. That proposal provides selectively-revocable anonymity in the sense that the anonymity of customers is guaranteed unless they act dishonestly by redeeming a multi-coupon more times than allowed. Nevertheless, that system lacks two important security properties of multi-coupons: unlinkability and unsplittability. After that, we propose a novel multi-coupon construction which takes Brands off-line e-coin system as a building block. In this way, the multi-coupon system inherits the selective-revocability property of the mentioned e-coin system without the need to develop new ad-hoc cryptography. Furthermore, the proposed system is also proven to be unlinkable and strongly unsplittable. Its design makes use of a novel extension of the RSA blind signature protocol which endows it with conditional secret recovery.

This Innovative Practice Category Work In Progress presents a singular experience of a cooperative education program in a Master Degree in Informatics Engineering in Spain, which is so far unique in the country at master level. This Master provides the students with the competences, attitudes and skills necessary to direct and carry out innovating projects in the area of information technology and communication in national and international companies. The usage of Problem Based Learning methodologies in different courses infers a decidedly practical-oriented nature to the program. This character has been reinforced introducing the co-op model, which involves companies in the overall learning process. The program started in 2015 and the first results are showing very encouraging in terms of students' satisfaction with their education and the high competence level of these students from the companies' perspective.

Elliptic curve crypto systems are nowadays widely used in the design of many security devices. Nevertheless, since not every elliptic curve is useful for cryptographic purposes, mechanisms for providing good curves are highly needed. The generation of the volcano graph of elliptic curves can help to provide such good curves. However, this procedure turns out to be very expensive when performed sequentially. Hence, a parallel application for the calculation of such volcano graphs is proposed in this paper. In order to obtain high efficiency, a theoretical analysis is provided for obtaining an accurate granularity and for giving the appropriate number of tasks to be created. Experimental results show the benefits obtained in the speedup when executing the application in a cluster of workstations with message-passing for the generation of different volcano graphs. By the use of simulation, we study the scalability of the implementation and show that a speedup of more than 80 can be achieved in some cases.