Themen

Privacy Guidelines for VR Use in Education  – English only

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are increasingly being integrated into educational settings, offering immersive learning experiences that significantly enhance student engagement and understanding. However, the use of VR in education raises critical privacy concerns that must be addressed to protect students' sensitive information. This seminar will explore the unique challenges posed by VR technology in safeguarding student privacy. We will identify various educational applications of VR, examine the types of data collected by VR devices—including biometric and spatial information—and discuss potential risks related to user identification and data misuse. The goal is to find a set of privacy guidelines tailored for educational VR use, covering aspects such as transparency, user controls, data security, and responsible biometric data handling.

Mostafa Yehia

Privacy-Preserving Learning Analytics: Challenges and Techniques  – English only

Learning analytics (LA) refers to the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting data from educational activities. It involves using this data to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs. Privacy-preserving learning analytics (PPLA) is a field aimed at balancing the benefits of LA with the protection of individuals' privacy in educational settings.

Mostafa Yehia

Security and Privacy of Smart Traffic Light Systems  – English only

The seminar "Security and Privacy of Smart Traffic Light Systems" explores the emerging challenges and solutions related to securing smart traffic light systems. As smart traffic light systems become increasingly interconnected and data-driven, they present new attack surfaces for cyber threats and raise concerns about data privacy. In this seminar, the student provides in the first step an overview of state-of-the-art smart traffic light systems. In the next step, the student will examine potential security and privacy threats and discuss protection mechanisms for these threats.

Artur Hermann

Intrusion Detection Systems in Automotive Networks  – English only

As modern vehicles incorporate more advanced driver assistance systems, both in-vehicle and V2X networks are becoming increasingly complex, integrating a wide range of sensors, communication protocols, and real-time data exchange. This growing complexity expands the attack surface and raises the need for robust, adaptive security mechanisms. In this seminar, the student provides an overview of different approaches of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in the context of in-vehicle and V2X networks.

Artur Hermann

Enhancing Policy Security in Zero Trust Architecture Through Master Policies  – English only

This seminar examines ways to improve the security of access rules in Zero Trust Networks. It discusses the creation of master policies that establish policy boundaries and can override standard policies if they are found to be incorrect. The seminar focuses on detection mechanisms that determine when a master policy should replace the rules of a regular network policy to increase the overall security.

Janek Schoffit

Incremental Policy Compilation in microsegmented Zero Trust Network Architectures  – English only

This seminar explores how policy deployment within microsegmented Zero Trust Architectures can be accelerated by using incremental compilation techniques to update only impacted nodes. It focuses on minimizing update cycles and enhancing adaptability in dynamic network environments.

Janek Schoffit

Autonomous Driving Simulation with V2X Communcation  – English only

Autonomous driving simulation with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication research aims to create high-fidelity virtual environments in which connected vehicles interact with roadside equipment, cloud services, pedestrians, and other vehicles to simulate real-world traffic dynamics. Students can investigate how cooperative perception, intent sharing, and coordinated moves increase security, safety, and efficiency without putting physical assets at risk by infusing standardized V2X message sets into simulators like CARLA.

Dennis Eisermann

Adversarial Attacks against Autonomous Drone Systems  – English only

This seminar investigates how small, deliberate disturbances, known as adversarial attacks, might confuse autonomous drones' vision, navigation, and decision-making systems. We will review recent advances in developing such attacks against vision, LiDAR, and sensor-fusion pipelines, as well as discuss real-world case studies in which drone operations were compromised.

Dennis Eisermann

Explainable AI  – English only

Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries and everyday life, but its "black box" nature often leaves users and stakeholders in the dark about how decisions are made. Imagine an AI system denying a loan or diagnosing a critical health condition - how can we trust it if we can’t understand it? This seminar paper's goal is to explore Explainable AI (XAI): an emerging field focused on creating transparent, interpretable AI models without sacrificing performance. You'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations), LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations), and interpretable neural networks, and assess their real-world applications in finance, healthcare, and beyond.

Natasa Trkulja

Trust Assessment in V2X Networks  – English only

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks are the key component of future intelligent transportation, enabling vehicles to exchange safety-critical information with each other and with other V2X network participants. However, the decentralized and highly dynamic nature of V2X networks introduces significant security risks from malicious or misbehaving nodes. Trust assessment has presented itself as a solution to these challenges - this paper will examine the role trust assessment has had in enabling vehicles to evaluate the trustworthiness of received messages and V2X communication partners based on a variety of different factors like behavior history, message plausibility and consistency, reputation, etc. The paper may cover various trust assessment methods and analyze their strengths and limitations in realistic traffic scenarios.

Natasa Trkulja

Navigating Trade-offs: Ensuring Data Utility While Protecting Privacy  – English only

This seminar will explore the balance between maintaining the usefulness of research datasets and safeguarding the privacy of individuals. You will look into different methods for protecting sensitive information, such as data anonymization and aggregation techniques, and discuss challenges these techniques face, with a focus on said trade-off.

Lukas Pietzschmann

Security Vulnerabilities in the Tor Network  – English only

The Tor network is a powerful tool for maintaining anonymity online, but it's not without its flaws. This seminar will explore security vulnerabilities that can compromise user safety, such as traffic analysis or the risks posed by malicious exit nodes. Through real-world examples, we will look into how these vulnerabilities have been exploited and discuss possible mitigations.

Lukas Pietzschmann

Comparing fault-tolerance frameworks and protocols  – English only

State-machine replication (SMR) is a well-known means to build fault-tolerant services by replicating them. Meanwhile there are many frameworks and protocols that claim to solve the problem. However, comparisons are hardly possible. Recently some work was done to allow for easier comparision of frameworks and protocols. The task is to present some of these works, their approaches and their features.

Franz J. Hauck

Composition of replicated state-machines  – English only

State-machine replication (SMR) is a well-known means to build fault-tolerant services by replicating them. Recent work gives some ideas how to compose SMR-based services to a new SMR-based service. Based on this, the problems and possible solutions of composed SMR-based services should be collected and presented. A central publication forms the basis for this topic, but we expect the student to also seek and look at related work.

Franz J. Hauck

Tracing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs  – English only

Heisenbugs are software errors in concurrent programs that are difficult to trace and reproduce, and are in most cases the result of race conditions. When trying to use a debugger to trace their root cause, Heisenbugs tend to disappear since the execution timing is altered. Adding additional debugging statements or changing the compiler optimization level might also make them disappear. The goal of this seminar is to research different approaches that allow to trace Heisenbugs or even prevent their occurrence in the first place.

Alexander Heß

State-Machine Replication with Hybrid Fault Tolerance  – English only

State-machine replication (SMR) is an established technique to build fault-tolerant services by deploying application on a number of replicated servers, and by enforcing that submitted requests are totally ordered and deterministically executed. Depending on the underlying failure model, such a system is able tolerate crashing servers, message losses and delays, or in case of the Byzantine failure model even arbitrary misbehaviour of a strict minority of nodes. In general, tolerating Byzantine behaviour requires a larger number of participating replicas, additional communication, as well as the use of cryptographic primitives. Hybrid fault models can be leveraged to reduce the overhead of the Byzantine fault-tolerance mechanism while still providing the resilience comprised by the Byzantine failure model. Such hybrid fault models can be realized by outsourcing critical parts of an SMR system into trusted execution environments (TEEs), which are assumed to be incorruptible even if the host machine is infiltrated.The goal of this seminar is to provide an overview of SMR systems that utilize TEEs to implement hybrid fault models.

Alexander Heß