Thesis Topics

The alps see a surge of trail parks being built. These trails include frequent turns and jumps which are often ridden at high speeds. If bikes block the trail due to a stop or accident, limited line-of-sight can lead to collisions and severe accidents when following bikes crash into the blocking bike. With this work, we want to investigate if V2X communication can provide blocked trail warnings to approaching bikes so that riders can reduce their speed and avoid accidents. For this, a number of technologies that have been developed for collision warning in automotive and street-based scenarios need to be investigated, adapted, and tested for suitability. This includes the V2X communication module and antenna, that need to be adjusted to fit into a bike. Communication ranges and reliability have to be tested in realistic outdoor settings. Second, it needs to be reliably determined whether a bike actually blocks a trail or whether the rider just stopped next to it. For this purpose, GPS accuracy alone is insufficient and might have to coupled with crash detection using motion sensors or camera-based image recognition to detect whether a bike blocks a trail or not. Last but not least, a suitable user interface has to be developed and tested that allows to warn approaching drivers in a reliable and intuitive way which works even during trail rides. The envisioned thesis or project can address one or multiple of these challenges, multiple students could also collaborate on the topic. The project is collaboration between Ulm University and University of Trento. After prototype development, field tests in the Alps in South Tyrolia / Alto Adige are planned.

Web accessibility refers to the practice of designing and developing websites and web-based applications to be inclusive and usable for all individuals, regardless of their physical and cognitive abilities and the way they access the web. Over the years, various standards and guidelines have been established to enhance the capabilities of assistive technologies, such as screen readers. This thesis aims to provide an in-depth overview and survey of the current state-of-the-art and best practices in web accessibility. Additionally, the thesis will evaluate the effects of adhering to web accessibility guidelines, such as WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA, by exploring how they impact the most widely-used assistive technologies. Optionally, a practical evaluation using an example website, such as the university website, can be included to demonstrate the implementation of these guidelines in real-world scenarios.

In traditional password-based authentication schemes, users can typically recover a forgotten password using their email address or remembered security questions. This only works because a centralized service provider has the authority to simply overwrite the user's password. However, traditional recovery techniques are impractical for decentralized and privacy-preserving protocols, which often rely on the user having a private key that is unknown to the service. Various approaches have been proposed in the past to address this challenge, such as physically printing the key and storing it in a secure location (e.g., the user's sock drawer), or deriving the key from a user-defined password or generated mnemonic phrase. This thesis should provide an overview of key recovery mechanisms and compare them to each other. To evaluate the practicality of these mechanisms and their suitability for different user demographics, a user study should be designed and conducted.

Publicly emerging AI-based tools such as ChatGPT, DeepL and GitHub Copilot have a huge disruptive impact which will eventually affect learning and teaching of university courses. In this highly explorative thesis, the student is expected to survey and evaluate the current state of available AI tools and estimate their potential using the example of the Computer Networks course. The work should include a review of the opportunities and risks for both students and instructors in applying these tools. From a methodological perspective, this work requires extensive literature reviews and should apply methods either from case study research or from action research.

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a technice to steer traffic through specific network services. To proof that the traffic was actually forwarded through the specified services, a Proof Of Transit (PoT) is used. In this project, different PoT approaches are compared and the most promising solution implemented in a HTTPS-based SFC environment.

Event-sourced graphs are a concept to capture graphs that are continuously evolving, e.g. based on a stream of live changes. Goal of this thesis is (a) to provide an overview of existing graph machine learning concepts, (b) to assess the applicability of machine learning mechansims on event-sourced graphs, and (c) to prove the feasibility with a prototype implementation. Basic knowledge of general machine learning concepts is a plus for this thesis.

Security assessments of networked systems require knowledge about the utilized communication protocol. For proprietary protocols without known specification and with only limited access to the end-points, the only source of information is the communication itself. To correctly conclude from the captured byte stream to message-formats, -types, and finally a protocol model, structure, message- and field-boundaries, data-type, and semantics need to be inferred. After an initial inference procedure, it is desirable to refine the existing protocol model. Actively probing an entity for the validity of message syntaxes allows to targetedly enhance the knowledge about the protocol. To do this efficiently a smart method of automatically generating test-cases depending on the current protocol model needs to be developed.