COMSYS students awarded for best PhD and BSc theses in Communication and Distributed Systems

Former COMSYS PhD student Dr. Tobias Heer (now Hirschmann Automation and Control) and COMSYS BSc student Jens Hiller were awarded the KuVS prize for the best theses in the area of Communication and Distributed Systems in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2012. Dr. Tobias Heer was awarded for his PhD thesis entitled “Direct End-to-Middle Authentication in Cooperative Networks”. In his thesis, Tobias presents, analyzes, and evaluates novel end-to-middle authentication protocols that aim to shelter middleboxes against resource misuse and protect end-hosts against DoS attacks targeting on-path middleboxes as a weak spot. He discusses different design options that enable middleboxes to efficiently verify the source and/or the integrity of forwarded packets at different transmission speeds. Thereby, he addresses the fundamental tension between security, performance, and lack of central control in cooperative networks. Jens Hiller was awarded for his Bachelor thesis “Implementation of the HIP Diet EXchange (DEX) and Optimizations for Smart Object Networks”. In his thesis, Jens Hiller implemented and analysed the IP security protocol HIP Diet EXchange for highly resource-constrained smart objects. Based on the analysis of the run-time overheads, Jens identified insufficiencies of the protocol for the target network scenario and proposed several optimizations for the protocol exchange. As a result, the run-time overheads of the HIP DEX exchange could be decreased significantly. Hence, the proposed optimizations considerably increase the applicability of HIP DEX in smart object networks. The thesis was advised by René Hummen. Congratulations to Tobias and Jens. We are looking forward to celebrate with them back in Aachen :-)