Research

The Institute of Distributed Systems is actively researching scalability, reliability, security and privacy, self-organization, and complexity management issues in distributed systems. We apply our research to a wide range of practical use cases, including cloud computing and vehicular communication networks.

Teaching

Moreover, we offer lectures and projects related to our research, including computer networks, distributed systems, and security and privacy. Open theses and projects can be found on the corresponding web pages. For exams, please refer to corresponding details.

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Our Most Recent Publications

Hermann, A., Remmers, J.N., Eisermann, D., Erb, B. and Kargl, F. 2026. VeReMi NextGen: A Dataset for Evaluating Misbehavior Detection Systems in VANETs. 2026 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC) (Montreal, Canada, Jun. 2026). [accepted for publication]
Bassi, F., Zhang , J., Jemaa, I.B., Kargl, F. and Erb, B. 2026. Improving Misbehaviour Detection Through Infrastructure Support Without Raising Complexity. 2026 IEEE 103rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2026-Spring) (Jun. 2026). [accepted for publication]
Ensuring the semantic correctness of exchanged kinematic data is critical for safety-critical Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications. While onboard Misbehaviour Detection (MBD) mechanisms help address this issue, their effectiveness is inherently limited by the vehicle’s local view. This work investigates whether lightweight, rule-based MBD can be significantly enhanced through infrastructure support without increasing computational complexity. We adopt a Trust Assessment Framework to control the inclusion of V2X data into the vehicle’s Extended Perception Map (EPM), based on trust levels derived from MBD outputs. We compare a standalone setup relying on local evidence only with a federated setup in which the infrastructure aggregates Misbehaviour Reports from multiple vehicles, assesses node trustworthiness, and disseminates this information back to vehicles. Simulation results under kinematic falsification attacks show that the federated setup consistently outperforms the standalone one in filtering altered observations.
Hermann, A., Füllhase, J. and Kargl, F. 2026. Enabling Vulnerability Awareness in V2X Networks Using Encrypted SBOMs. 2026 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC) (Montreal, Canada, Jun. 2026). [accepted for publication]
Trkulja, N., Erb, B. and Kargl, F. 2026. Disbelief-Favouring Trust Discounting for Adversarial Multi-Hop Trust Assessment using Subjective Logic. 2026 29th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION) (Trondheim, Norway, Jun. 2026). [accepted for publication]
Hermann, A., Trkulja, N., Eisermann, D., Erb, B. and Kargl, F. 2025. Hyperparameter Optimization-Based Trust Quantification for Misbehavior Detection Systems. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Nov. 2025), 2589–2596.
Vehicular communication via V2X networks significantly improves road safety, but is vulnerable to data manipulation, which can lead to serious incidents. To address this threat, misbehavior detection systems (MBDs) have been developed to detect such misbehavior. In order to enhance the detection of data manipulation, trust assessment in V2X networks has recently gained increasing attention. Trust assessment takes into account the output of various security mechanisms such as MBDs or Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) to detect misbehavior. One particular challenge in trust assessment is the appropriate quantification of the output of these security mechanisms into trust opinions. In this paper, we propose a trust quantification methodology that transforms the output of an MBD into a subjective logic opinion. Furthermore, we apply a hyperparameter optimization approach to determine the optimal parameter set for an MBD. Our evaluation using three MBD variants shows that the optimization approach significantly increased the detection-performance of all MBDs. The MBD variant that used the optimization approach and our proposed trust quantification methodology achieved the best performance, increasing the F1 score by over 13% compared to other state-of-the-art MBD variants analyzed in this work.

Click here for an overview of all our publications.

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Contact

Secretary's Office

Marion Köhler
Jessica Reib
E-Mail
Phone: +49 731 50-24140
Fax: +49 731 50-24142

Postal Address

Institute of Distributed Systems
Ulm University
Albert-Einstein-Allee 11
89081 Ulm

Visiting Address

James-Franck-Ring
Building O27, Room 349
89081 Ulm

Office Hours

Monday, Tuesday 7am to 12pm
Wednesday, Thursday from 7am to 4pm
Friday 8am to 2pm

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