Security and Privacy

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)

Current Projects

Openings

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Past Projects

Selected Publications

Advancing Network Monitoring with Packet-Level Records and Selective Flow Aggregation. Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS ‘25), May 12 - May 16, 2025, Honolulu, HI, USA. May 2025.
Detecting Ransomware Despite I/O Overhead: A Practical Multi-Staged Approach. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS ‘25), Feb 24 - Feb 28, 2025, San Diego, CA, USA. February 2025.
An Interdisciplinary Survey on Information Flows in Supply Chains. ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 56, no. 2. February 2024.
Secrets Revealed in Container Images: An Internet-wide Study on Occurrence and Impact. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS ‘23), Jul 10 - Jul 14, 2023, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. July 2023.
Designing Secure and Privacy-Preserving Information Systems for Industry Benchmarking. Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE ‘23), vol. 13901, Jun 12 - Jun 16, 2023, Zaragoza, Spain. June 2023.
Missed Opportunities: Measuring the Untapped TLS Support in the Industrial Internet of Things. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS ‘22), May 30 - Jun 3, 2022, Nagasaki, Japan. May 2022.