Distributed and Embedded Security (DIES)

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)

Section head: Prof. dr. P.H. Hartel

Keywords: security

In information security, one leak is sufficient to spoil the security of a system. It is therefore imperative to control the security properties of all components of a system. This is hard because;

1.	there might be a large number of components

2.	we do not know all the components of a system that interacts with the outside world

3.	we cannot control or even exhaustively describe the possible interactions of an attacker with these components

Interaction with the world around occurs, for example, when people are required to use passwords that are not easy to guess, or when the network is wireless, and thus shares the airwaves with everybody else. For distributed and embedded systems security is even more difficult, because these are often resource constrained, dynamically evolving, unattended and are very open and accessible to attackers.

As a security group, we therefore choose to focus on distributed and embedded systems. The research mission of the DIES group is "to provide fundamental improvements for the security of distributed and embedded systems, by designing suitable building blocks and fostering systematic reasoning."

Our research can be categorised according to the topic, the tools used and the application area.

We work on the following topics:

·	data security

·	network security

·	cybercrime prevention

Tools we use are:

·	cryptographic algorithms and protocols

·	formal methods and statistics

·	simulation and case studies

Our results are applied in the following application areas:

·	health and food management

·	critical control systems

·	social and enterprise networks

Key persons: prof. dr. P.H. Hartel, Prof. dr. D. Pavlovic, prof. dr. S. Etalle, dr. F. Kargl

Projects

European funding

·	PRECIOSA: Privacy Enabled Capability in Co-operative Systems and Safety Applications

National funding

·	ALwEN: Ambient Living with Embedded Networks

·	CASTOR: Controlling Access to SCADA Networked Systems

·	HERMES: Host-based Event Mining in SCADA systems

·	Kindred Spirits: Privacy Enhanced Social Networking

·	MIDAS: Intrusion detection for SCADA

·	Natural Teggs: Egg Classification

·	SEDAN: Searchable Data Encryption

·	SPCMHD: Secure Patient-Centric Management of Health Data

·	VISPER: The VIrtual Security PERimeter for digital, physical, and organisational security

·	VRIEND: Value-Based Security Risk Mitigation in Enterprise Networks that are Decentralized

University funding

·	DSN: Dependable Systems and Networks

·	Istrice: Integrated Security and Privacy in a Networked World

·	Prosecco: Next Generation Protection and Security of Content

·	S3CADA: Secure and Survivable SCADA

Publications DIES