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.

Social Media

Our Most Recent Publications

Meißner, E., Kargl, F., Benjamin, E. and Engelmann, F. 2025. PrePaMS: Privacy-Preserving Participant Management System for Studies with Rewards and Prerequisites. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. 2025, 1 (2025). [accepted for publication]
Taking part in surveys, experiments, and studies is often compensated by rewards to increase the number of participants and encourage attendance. While privacy requirements are usually considered for participation, privacy aspects of the reward procedure are mostly ignored. To this end, we introduce PrePaMS, an efficient participation management system that supports prerequisite checks and participation rewards in a privacy-preserving way. Our system organizes participations with potential (dis-)qualifying dependencies and enables secure reward payoffs. By leveraging a set of proven cryptographic primitives and mechanisms such as anonymous credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, participations are protected so that service providers and organizers cannot derive the identity of participants even within the reward process. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a prototype of PrePaMS to show its effectiveness and evaluated its performance under realistic workloads. PrePaMS covers the information whether subjects have participated in surveys, experiments, or studies. When combined with other secure solutions for the actual data collection within these events, PrePaMS can represent a cornerstone for more privacy-preserving empirical research.
Heß, A., Hauck, F.J. and Meißner, E. 2024. Consensus-agnostic state-machine replication. 25th ACM/IFIP Int. Middleware Conf. (Dec. 2024). [accepted for publication]
Hauck, F.J. and Heß, A. 2024. Linearizability and state-machine replication: Is it a match? ArXiv.org.
Bradatsch, L., Hermann, A. and Kargl, F. 2024. Attribute Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment for ABAC and TBAC Systems. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Security and Cryptography (Jul. 2024), 26–39.
Schillings, C., Meißner, E., Erb, B., Bendig, E., Schultchen, D., Pollatos, O. and others 2024. Effects of a Chatbot-Based Intervention on Stress and Health-Related Parameters in a Stressed Sample: Randomized Controlled Trial. JMIR Mental Health. 11, 1 (May 2024), e50454.

Click here for an overview of all our publications.

Old news can be found in the archive.

Contact

Secretary's Office

Marion Köhler
Lysha Lewis
E-Mail
Phone: +49 731 50-24140
available in the morning
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
Monday, Wednesday and Thursday all day
Tuesday and Friday mornings only.

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