The research vision of the Security and Privacy Group at COMSYS is the analysis, design, and evaluation of secure and privacy-preserving communication systems across various domains, including the Industrial Internet of Things, Smart Grids, and healthcare, among others.

To realize this vision, we most notably craft novel (and sustainable) security and privacy architectures, paradigms, and mechanisms as well as improve upon existing approaches to security and privacy. We consider all types of systems and networks, e.g. ranging from highly resource-constrained IoT networks to distributed (peer-to-peer) applications and networks and large-scale cloud deployments.

Our used and developed technologies range from soft privacy solutions such as semantic annotations and behavioral nudges to applied cryptography or confidential computing for strong and provable security and privacy guarantees.

The close cooperation with the other research groups at COMSYS allows us to work closely with domain experts from various types of communication systems, most notably, centering around industrial, medical, and corporate use cases.

Currently, we pursue this research vision by tackling the following research topics:

1. Security and Privacy in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
   • Enabling privacy-sensitive dataflows between different (mutually distrusting) stakeholders
   • Protocol design with existing building blocks (e.g., Bloom filter, HE, PSI, OT, ...) to offer novel use cases
   • Detecting, analyzing, and restricting network flows in the IIoT to improve the network security
   • Secure integration of legacy industrial devices into communication over the Internet
   • Network monitoring solutions that cover industrial performance demands and protocols
2. Security and Privacy in Decentralized Information Systems
   • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Alternatives to traditional (centralized) cloud computing
   • Approaches for sovereign data sharing and privacy-preserving processing
   • Information/Privacy leakage from distributed analysis mechanisms
   • Applications sourcing decentralized infrastructure, with a focus on medical and business use cases
3. Network Security for the IP-based Internet of Things
   • Secure end-to-end communication of highly resource-constrained devices
   • Adaptive configuration and selection of security concepts, mechanisms, and ciphersuites
   • Delegation of security tasks to less resource-constrained gateways
4. (Host-centric) Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems
   • Studying how network information can improve host-based intrusion detection
   • Enabling efficient real-time detection of ransomware
5. Privacy Enhancing Techniques (PETs)
   • Protocols for secure (industrial) collaboration (e.g., using Homomorphic Encryption)
   • Quantitative modeling of privacy protection and risk (e.g., Differential Privacy)
   • Reconciling PETs and user perception of privacy (e.g., empirical user studies)

The Security and Privacy Group typically has thesis topics available for motivated and talented students. An excerpt of available theses can be seen from inside the RWTH University network. If you have specific interests, you may contact any group member individually.