Themen

IPFS and Dat – English only

The world wide web and the internet are designed as decentralized and heterogeneous networks and play an important role in our every day. However, data is often only stored at a single point or a website is only served by one web server. Once the data is deleted or a server goes offline it might be unavailable for everyone else. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the Dat project are two similar ideas to address this type of centralization using a content-addressable distributed file system. This seminar should introduce and explain IPFS and Dat, discuss use cases, and explore real world applications of these technologies.

Echo Meißner

Zero-knowledge Proofs – English only

In cryptography zero-knowledge proofs are protocols for two parties where on party can proof a statement to a verifying party without revealing additional information to the verifier except that the statement is true. This cryptographic building block is used within a variety of applications and other cryptographic protocols, such as authentication, distributed ledgers, and online voting. This topic should introduce zero-knowledge proofs and provide an overview of different types of zero-knowledge proofs as well as how proofs for different statements can be constructed.

Echo Meißner

Security and privacy problems of electric vehicle charging systems – English only

Due to the limited range of electric vehicles, they rely on electric vehicle charging stations to travel further distances. During the charging process of an electric vehicle, many components communicate with each other. This can lead to security and privacy problems if this communication is not properly secured. In this seminar, some security and privacy problems will be identified. In the next step, possible countermeasures to these problems will be determined.

Artur Hermann

Attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks – English only

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicles to communicate with each other, but also with other components. This allows various applications to be realized that increase the safety and efficiency of vehicles. However, without protection mechanisms, attacks are possible, which can lead to safety and privacy problems. In this seminar, some well known attacks in VANETS and possible countermeasures will be identified and analyzed.

Artur Hermann

Opportunities and challenges of vehicular edge computing – English only

Many vehicular applications, such as autonomous driving, will require a lot of computing and storage capacities in the future. In addition, these applications will have stringent performance requirements in terms of response time and network bandwidth. One way to meet these requirements is vehicle edge computing, which places computing and storage capacity at the edge of the network. This offers many opportunities. On the other hand, it also results in many challenges. In this seminar, these opportunities and challenges of vehicular edge computing will be identified and possible solutions will be described.

Artur Hermann

The Edge of Artificial Intelligence – English only

This seminar paper is meant to explore the limits that the field of artificial intelligence had reached in terms of computer vision (seeing), speech recognition (hearing), chat and voicebots (speaking), and machine learning (analyzing and predicting). How close/far are the capabilities of artificial intelligence to those of humans?

Natasa Trkulja

Trading in Our Privacy – English only

The goal of this seminar paper is to investigate the types of data that is being collected through our usage of various electronic devices (smart phones, desktops, laptops, wearables, smart home devices, etc.), as well as its use. Moreover, this paper should also aim to research the technologies that are being implemented to protect our privacy and analyze their effectiveness.

Natasa Trkulja

Automotive Cybersecurity – English only

The goal of this seminar paper is to conduct a survey of the latest cybersecurity attacks in the automotive domain while explaining the functionality of each attack and its effectiveness. In addition, the paper should explore any defense mechanisms implemented to protect against these attacks.

Natasa Trkulja

Perimeter Security and why it is no longer sufficient – English only

Perimeter security is still the dominant network security architecture in 2022. In this paper, the basic principle of perimeter security will be presented. Above all, however, the weak points are to be pointed out.

Leonard Bradatsch

Attacks on WPA3 – English only

The purpose of this seminar paper is to evaluate which weaknesses WPA3 has. It will also show what went wrong (once again) during the development of the standard.

Leonard Bradatsch

Network Security Breaches – English only

The goal of this seminar is the outlining of popular network security breaches (1-3 examples). Subsequently, state-of-the-art protection or detection approaches against these presented breaches should be explained.

Leonard Bradatsch

Federated Learning – English only

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning technique, enabling parties to train their own model, using their own data on the device. An important aspect of FL is that this data never leaves the device. Your task in this seminar is to investigate the role of FL in supporting privacy-sensitive applications, while analyzing its advantages and core challenges.

Migena Ymeraj

Distributed Machine Learning – English only

Due to the poor scalability and efficiency of learning algorithms, Machine Learning cannot handle large-scale data. This issue gave rise to Distributed Machine Learning. Even though it is a promising line of research, it still faces a lot of challenges. The goal of this seminar is to discover the importance of Distributed Machine Learning, while comparing it with traditional Machine Learning environments and investigating its challenges.

Migena Ymeraj

Secure Multi-Party Computation – English only

The goal of Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is to enable parties to work together without ever knowing one another's confidential information. It plays an important role in solving security and privacy issues and there are many examples of where it can be helpful. The aim of this seminar is to investigate MPC with respect to both theoretical and practical aspects.

Migena Ymeraj

CRDTs in the Wild – English only

Conflict-free replicated data types are a concept to ensure consistency among replicated nodes even when update operations are performed concurrently. Up until now, there are two established architectures for CRDTs, accompanied by a multitude of different implementations. CRDT's achieve strong eventual consistency, which means that all replicated nodes will have the same state after they've received the same set of updates. Since this is a useful consistency model for certain applications, they are already used in various production systems. The goal of this seminar is to provide an overview of the internal mechanisms of CRDTs, and how their used in real-world applications.

Alexander Heß

Checkpoint Strategies for State-Machine Replication – English only

State-machine Replication is a well-established technique for building fault-tolerant services. With this approach, multiple replicated servers are operated that process the same sequence of requests. In a production system, replicas periodically create a checkpoint by writing their internal state to disk. This is required to rapidly recover from a crash and to garbage-collect the request log. In general, however, this requires to halt the replica's execution in order to ensure a consistent checkpoint. This in turn affects the performance of the overall system, if executed by all replica's at the same point in time. Recently, more efficient approaches have been proposed that produce comparable checkpoints, but have less of an impact on the system's performance. The task of this seminar is to elaborate the challenges of efficient checkpoint generation, and to provide an overview of different approaches that address those challenges.

Alexander Heß

Persistent Memory for State-Machine Replication – English only

State-machine Replication is a well-established technique for building fault-tolerant services. With this approach, multiple replicated servers are operated that process the same sequence of requests. In case one of these replicas suffers from a power outage, it may loose state updates that have not yet been written to disk. After a reboot, such a replica has to recover by querying other replicas for the missing data. Persistent memory modules provide a non-volatile alternative to DRAM modules. Their integration would allow to circumvent this extra step, since the replica's state can be recovered locally. However, these modules come with a performance penalty compared to DRAM modules. As a consequence, simply replacing DRAM with persistent memory modules, would drastically reduce the system's performance. In recent years, different strategies have been proposed to mitigate this performance penalty, while still achieving efficient recovery. The task of this seminar is to outline the challenges of integrating persistent memory in SMR-based system.

Alexander Heß

Linearizability in Concurrent Systems – English only

Linearizability is a strong consistency model for concurrent systems, which requires concurrent operations on shared objects to appear instantaneously. This can be achieved by defining a linearization point for operations where all modifications have to take place atomically, and which is placed somewhere between the operation's invocation and its response. Ensuring this property facilitates to reason about the internal's of a concurrent system. The goal of this seminar is to elaborate the core concepts of Linearizability and support those with illustrative examples.

Franz J. Hauck

Software Transactional Memory – English only

Software transactional memory (STM) is an abstraction mechanism that allows to make a series of modifications in memory appear as a single atomic operation. There are different design philosophies that tend to build on either pessimistic or optimistic transactional processing. While some STM implementations rely on locks, others make use of atomic instructions when accessing memory locations. Nonetheless, practical approaches have to manage multiple versions of the data that is kept in memory, and have to perform some form of dependency tracking to avoid data inconsistencies. The task of this seminar is to provide an introduction to STM, and an overview of different approaches proposed in literature.

Franz J. Hauck

Feasibility of real-world evasion attacks against machine learning for image recognition – English only

This seminar topic shall compare existing machine learning evasion attacks on image recognition models to estimate their feasibility under the assumption of a limited attacker. Thus, the most recent attacks that propose to work with a physical patch or object–forged to manipulate the recognition outcome without direct access to the software or hardware (e. g., digital camera image)–should be identified from literature. A selection of three of these attacks should be compared with each other with focus on the qualitative discussion how likely the attack may be a threat to a deployed cyber physical system.

Stephan Kleber (Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation)

Sorted by Topics

• Automotive Security
  • Automotive Cybersecurity
  • Security and privacy problems of electric vehicle charging systems
  • Attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks
  • Opportunities and challenges of vehicular edge computing
• Machine Learning & AI
  • The Edge of Artificial Intelligence
  • Feasibility of real-world evasion attacks against machine learning for image recognition
  • Federated Learning
  • Distributed Machine Learning
• Network Security
  • Perimeter Security and why it is no longer sufficient
  • Attacks on WPA3
  • Network Security Breaches
• Concurrent and Distributed Systems
  • CRDTs in the Wild
  • Software Transactional Memory
  • Linearizability in Concurrent Systems
  • IPFS and Dat
• State-Machine Replication
  • Checkpoint Strategies for State-Machine Replication
  • Persistent Memory for State-Machine Replication
• Applied Cryptography and Privacy
  • Zero-knowledge Proofs
  • Secure Multi-Party Computation
  • Trading in Our Privacy