SNE Master LeftOver Projects 2020

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Blockchain's Relationship with Sovrin for Digital Self-Sovereign Identities.

Summary: Sovrin (sorvin.org) is a blockchain for self-sovereign identities. TNO operates one of the nodes of the Sovrin network. Sovrin enables easy exchange and verification of identity information (e.g. "age=18+") for business transactions. Potential savings are estimated to be over 1 B€ per year for just the Netherlands. However, Sovrin provides only an underlying infrastructure. Additional query-response protocols are needed. This is being studied in e.g. the Techruption Self-Sovereign-Identity-Framework (SSIF); project. The research question is which functionalities are needed in the protocols for this. The work includes the development of a datamodel, as well as an implementation that connects to the Sovrin network.
(2018-05)

Oskar van Deventer <oskar.vandeventer=>tno.nl>

Sensor data streaming framework for Unity.

In order to build a Virtual Reality "digital twin" of an existing technical framework (like a smart factory), the static 3D representation needs to "play" sensor data which either is directly connected or comes from a stored snapshot. Although a specific implementation of this already exists, the student is asked to build a more generic framework for this, which is also able to "play" position data of parts of the infrastructure (for example moving robots). This will enable the research on virtually working on a digital twin factory.
Research question:

What are the requirements and limitations of a seamless integration of smart factory sensor data for a digital twin scenario?

There are existing network capabilities of Unity, existing connectors from Unity to ROS (robot operation system) for sensor data transmission and an existing 3D model which uses position data.
The student is asked to:

Build a generic infrastructure which can either play live data or snapshot data.
The sensor data will include position data, but also other properties which are displayed in graphs and should be visualized by 2D plots within Unity.

The software framework will be published under an open source license after the end of the project.

Doris Aschenbrenner <d.aschenbrenner=>tudelft.nl>

To optimize or not: on the impact of architectural optimizations on network performance.

Project description: Networks are becoming extremely fast. On our testbed with 100Gbps network cards, we can send up to 150 millions of packets per second with under 1us of latency. To support such speeds, many microarchitectural optimizations such as the use of huge pages and direct cache placement of network packets need to be in effect. Unfortunately, these optimizations if not done carefully can significantly harm performance or security. While the security aspects are becoming clear [1], the end-to-end performance impacts remain unknown. In this project, you will investigate the performance impacts of using huge pages and last level cache management in high-performance networking environments. If you were always wondering what happens when receiving millions of packets at nanosecond scale, this project is for you!

Requirements: C programming, knowledge of computer architecture and operating systems internals.

[1] NetCAT: Practical Cache Attacks from the Network, Security and Privacy 2020.

Animesh Trivedi <(animesh.trivedi=>vu.nl>
Kaveh Razavi <kaveh=>cs.vu.nl>

The other faces of RDMA virtualization.

Project description: RDMA is a technology that enabled very efficient transfer of data over the network. With 100Gbps RDMA-enabled network cards, it is possible to send hundreds of millions of messages with under 1us latency. Traditionally RDMA has mostly been used in single-user setups in HPC environments. However, recently RDMA technology has been commoditized and used in general purpose workloads such as key-value stores and transaction processing. Major data centers such as Microsoft Azure are already using this technology in their backend services. It is not surprising that there is now support for RDMA virtualization to make it available to virtual machines. We would like you to investigate the limitations of this new technology in terms of isolation and quality of service between different tenants.

Requirements: C programming, knowledge of computer architecture and operating systems internals.

Supervisors: Animesh Trivedi and Kaveh Razavi, VU Amsterdam

Animesh Trivedi <(animesh.trivedi=>vu.nl>
Kaveh Razavi <kaveh=>cs.vu.nl>

Verification of Objection Location Data through Picture Data Mining Techniques.

Shadows in the open give out more information about the location of the objects in the pictures. According to the positioning, length, and reflection side of the shadow, verification of location information found in the meta data of a picture can be verified. The objective of this project is to develop such algorithms that find freely available images on the internet where tempering with the location data has been performed. The deliverable from this project are the location verification algorithms, a live web service that verifies the location information of the object, and a non-public facing database that contains information about images that had the location information in their meta-data, removed or falsely altered.

Junaid Chaudhry <chaudhry=>ieee.org>

Artificial Intelligence Assisted carving.

Problem Description:

Carving for data and locating files belonging to Principal can be hard if we only use keywords. This still requires a lot of manual work to create keyword lists, which might not even be sufficient to find what we are looking for.

Goal:

Create a simple framework to detect documents of a certain set (or company) within carved data by utilizing machine learning. Closely related to document identification.

The research project below is currently the only open project at our Forensics department rated at MSc level. Of course, if your students have any ideas for a cybersecurity/forensics related project they are always welcome to contact us.

Danny Kielman <danny.kielman=>fox-it.com>
Mattijs Dijkstra <mattijs.dijkstra=>fox-it.com>

Usage Control in the Mobile Cloud.

Mobile clouds [1] aim to integrate mobile computing and sensing with rich computational resources offered by cloud back-ends. They are particularly useful in services such as transportation, healthcare and so on when used to collect, process and present data from physical world. In this thesis, we will focus on the usage control, in particular privacy, of the collected data pertinent to mobile clouds. Usage control[2] differs from traditional access control by not only enforcing security requirements on the release of data by also on what happens afterwards. The thesis will involve the following steps:

Propose an architecture over cloud for "usage control as a service" (extension of authorization as a service) for the enforcement of usage control policies
Implement the architecture (compatible with Openstack[3] and Android) and evaluate its performance.

References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cloud_computing
[2] Jaehong Park, Ravi S. Sandhu: The UCONABC usage control model. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 7(1): 128-174 (2004)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
[4] Slim Trabelsi, Jakub Sendor: "Sticky policies for data control in the cloud" PST 2012: 75-80

Fatih Turkmen <F.Turkmen=>uva.nl>
Yuri Demchenko <y.demchenko=>uva.nl>

Security of embedded technology.

Analyzing the security of embedded technology, which operates in an ever changing environment, is Riscure's primary business. Therefore, research and development (R&D) is of utmost importance for Riscure to stay relevant. The R&D conducted at Riscure focuses on four domains: software, hardware, fault injection and side-channel analysis. Potential SNE Master projects can be shaped around the topics of any of these fields. We would like to invite interested students to discuss a potential Research Project at Riscure in any of the mentioned fields. Projects will be shaped according to the requirements of the SNE Master.
;
Please have a look at our website for more information: https://www.riscure.com
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Previous Research Projects conducted by SNE students:

If you want to see what the atmosphere is at Riscure, please have a look at: https://vimeo.com/78065043
Please let us know If you have any additional questions!

Ronan Loftus <loftus=>riscure.com>
Alexandru Geana <Geana=>riscure.com>
Karolina Mrozek <Mrozek=>riscure.com>
Dana Geist <geist=>riscure.com>

Cross-blockchain oracle.

Interconnection between different blockchain instances, and smart contracts residing on those, will be essential for a thriving multi-blockchain business ecosystem. Technologies like hashed timelock contracts (HTLC) enable atomic swaps of cryptocurrencies and tokens between blockchains. A next challenge is the cross-blockchain oracle, where the status of an oracle value on one blockchain enables or prevents a transaction on another blockchain.
The goal of this research project is to explore the possibilities, impossibilities, trust assumptions, security and options for a cross-blockchain oracle, as well as to provide a minimal viable implementation.
(2018-05)

Oskar van Deventer <oskar.vandeventer=>tno.nl>
Maarten Everts <maarten.everts=>tno.nl>

Network aware performance optimization for Big Data applications using coflows.

Optimizing data transmission is crucial to improve the performance of data intensive applications. In many cases, network traffic control plays a key role in optimising data transmission especially when data volumes are very large. In many cases, data-intensive jobs can be divided into multiple successive computation stages, e.g., in MapReduce type jobs. A computation stage relies on the outputs of the the previous stage and cannot start until all its required inputs are in place. Inter-stage data transfer involves a group of parallel flows, which share the same performance goal such as minimising the flow's completion time.

CoFlow is an application-aware network control model for cluster-based data centric computing. The CoFlow framework is able to schedule the network usage based on the abstract application data flows (called coflows). However, customizing CoFlow for different application patterns, e.g., choosing proper network scheduling strategies, is often difficult, in particular when the high level job scheduling tools have their own optimizing strategies.

The project aims to profile the behavior of CoFlow with different computing platforms, e.g., Hadoop and Spark etc.

Review the existing CoFlow scheduling strategies and related work
Prototyping test applications using; big data platforms (including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Tez).
Set up coflow test bed (Aalo, Varys etc.) using existing CoFlow installations.
Benchmark the behavior of CoFlow in different application patterns, and characterise the behavior.

Background reading:

CoFlow introduction: http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-211.pdf
Junchao Wang, Huan Zhouy, Yang Huz, Cees de Laatx and Zhiming Zhao, Deadline-Aware Coflow Scheduling in a DAG, in NetCloud 2017, Hongkong, to appear [upon request]

More info: Junchao Wang, Spiros Koulouzis, Zhiming Zhao

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Elastic data services for time critical distributed workflows.

Large-scale observations over extended periods of time are necessary for constructing and validating models of the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to provide advanced computational networked infrastructure for transporting large datasets and performing data-intensive processing. Data infrastructures manage the lifecycle of observation data and provide services for users and workflows to discover, subscribe and obtain data for different application purposes. In many cases, applications have high performance requirements, e.g., disaster early warning systems.

This project focuses on data aggregation and processing use-cases from European research infrastructures, and investigates how to optimise infrastructures to meet critical time requirements of data services, in particular for different patterns of data-intensive workflow. The student will use some initial software components [1] developed in the ENVRIPLUS [2] and SWITCH [3] projects, and will:

Model the time constraints for the data services and the characteristics of data access patterns found in given use cases.
Review the state of the art technologies for optimising virtual infrastructures.
Propose and prototype an elastic data service solution based on a number of selected workflow patterns.
Evaluate the results using a use case provided by an environmental research infrastructure.

Reference:

More info: —Spiros Koulouzis, Paul Martin, Zhiming Zhao

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Contextual information capture and analysis in data provenance.

Tracking the history of events and the evolution of data plays a crucial role in data-centric applications for ensuring reproducibility of results, diagnosing faults, and performing optimisation of data-flow. Data provenance systems [1] are a typical solution, capturing and recording the events generated in the course of a process workflow using contextual metadata, and providing querying and visualisation tools for use in analysing such events later.

Conceptual models such as W3C PROV (and extensions such as ProvONE), OPM and CERIF have been proposed to describe data provenance, and a number of different solutions have been developed. Choosing a suitable provenance solution for a given workflow system or data infrastructure requires consideration of not only the high-level workflow or data pipeline, but also performance issues such as the overhead of event capture and the volume of provenance data generated.

The project will be conducted in the context of EU H2020 ENVRIPLUS project [1, 2]. The goal of this project is to provide practical guidelines for choosing provenance solutions. This entails:

Reviewing the state of the art for provenance systems.
Prototyping sample workflows that demonstrate selected provenance models.
Benchmarking the results of sample workflows, and defining guidelines for choosing between different provenance solutions (considering metadata, logging, analytics, etc.).

References:

About project: http://www.envriplus.eu
Provenance background in ENVRIPLUS: https://surfdrive.surf.nl/files/index.php/s/uRa1AdyURMtYxbb
Michael Gerhards, Volker Sander, Torsten Matzerath, Adam Belloum, Dmitry Vasunin, and Ammar Benabdelkader. 2011. Provenance opportunities for WS-VLAM: an exploration of an e-science and an e-business approach. In Proceedings of the 6th workshop on Workflows in support of large-scale science (WORKS '11). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2110497.2110505

More info: - Zhiming Zhao, Adam Belloum, Paul Martin

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Profiling Partitioning Mechanisms for Graphs with Different Characteristics.

In computer systems, graph is an important model for describing many things, such as workflows, virtual infrastructures, ontological model etc. Partitioning is an frequently used graph operation in the contexts like parallizing workflow execution, mapping networked infrastructures onto distributed data centers [1], and controlling load balance of resources. However, developing an effective partition solution is often not easy; it is often a complex optimization issue involves constraints like system performance and cost constraints.;

A comprehensive benchmark on graph partitioning mechanisms is helpful to choose a partitioning solver for a specific model. This portfolio can also give advices on how to partition based on the characteristics of the graph. This project aims at benchmarking the existing partition algorithms for graphs with different characteristics, and profiling their applicability for specific type of graphs.;
This project will be conducted in the context of EU SWITCH [2] project. the students will:

Review the state of the art of the graph partitioning algorithms and related tools, such as Chaco, METIS and KaHIP, etc.
Investigate how to define the characteristics of a graph, such as sparse graph, skewed graph, etc. This can also be discussed with different graph models, like planar graph, DAG, hypergraph, etc.
Build a benchmark for different types of graphs with various partitioning mechanisms and find the relationship behind.;
Discuss about how to choose a partitioning mechanism based on the graph characteristics.

Reading material:

Zhou, H., Hu Y., Wang, J., Martin, P., de Laat, C. and Zhao, Z., (2016) Fast and Dynamic Resource Provisioning for Quality Critical Cloud Applications, IEEE International Symposium On Real-time Computing (ISORC) 2016, York UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2016.22
SWITCH: www.switchproject.eu

More info: Huan Zhou, Arie Taal, Zhiming Zhao

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Auto-Tuning for GPU Pipelines and Fused Kernels.

Achieving high performance on many-core accelerators is a complex task, even for experienced programmers. This task is made even more challenging by the fact that, to achieve high performance, code optimization is not enough, and auto-tuning is often necessary. The reason for this is that computational kernels running on many-core accelerators need ad-hoc configurations that are a function of kernel, input, and accelerator characteristics to achieve high performance. However, tuning kernels in isolation may not be the best strategy for all scenarios.

Imagine having a pipeline that is composed by a certain number of computational kernels. You can tune each of these kernels in isolation, and find the optimal configuration for each of them. Then you can use these configurations in the pipeline, and achieve some level of performance. But these kernels may depend on each other, and may also influence each other. What if the choice of a certain memory layout for one kernel causes performance degradation on another kernel?

One of the existing optimization strategies to deal with pipelines is to fuse kernels together, to simplify execution patterns and decrease overhead. In this project we aim to measure the performance of accelerated pipelines in three different tuning scenarios:

tuning each component in isolation,
tuning the pipeline as a whole, and
tuning the fused kernel. Measuring the performance of one or more pipelines in these scenarios we hope to, on one level, being able to determine which is the best strategy for the specific pipelines on different hardware platform, and on another level we hope to better understand which are the characteristics that influence this behavior.

Rob van Nieuwpoort <R.vanNieuwpoort=>uva.nl>

Auto-tuning for Power Efficiency.

Auto-tuning is a well-known optimization technique in computer science. It has been used to ease the manual optimization process that is traditionally performed by programmers, and to maximize the performance portability. Auto-tuning works by just executing the code that has to be tuned many times on a small problem set, with different tuning parameters. The best performing version is than subsequently used for the real problems. Tuning can be done with application-specific parameters (different algorithms, granularity, convergence heuristics, etc) or platform parameters (number of parallel threads used, compiler flags, etc).

For this project, we apply auto-tuning on GPUs. We have several GPU applications where the absolute performance is not the most important bottleneck for the application in the real world. Instead the power dissipation of the total system is critical. This can be due to the enormous scale of the application, or because the application must run in an embedded device. An example of the first is the Square Kilometre Array, a large radio telescope that currently is under construction. With current technology, it will need more power than all of the Netherlands combined. In embedded systems, power usage can be critical as well. For instance, we have GPU codes that make images for radar systems in drones. The weight and power limitations are an important bottleneck (batteries are heavy).

In this project, we use power dissipation as the evaluation function for the auto-tuning system. Earlier work by others investigated this, but only for a single compute-bound application. However, many realistic applications are memory-bound. This is a problem, because loading a value from the L1 cache can already take 7-15x more energy than an instruction that only performs a computation (e.g., multiply).

There also are interesting platform parameters than can be changed in this context. It is possible to change both core and memory clock frequencies, for instance. It will be interesting to if we can at runtime, achieve the optimal balance between these frequencies.

We want to perform auto-tuning on a set of GPU benchmark applications that we developed.

Rob van Nieuwpoort <R.vanNieuwpoort=>uva.nl>

Applying and Generalizing Data Locality Abstractions for Parallel Programs.

TIDA is a library for high-level programming of parallel applications, focusing on data locality. TIDA has been shown to work well for grid-based operations, like stencils and convolutions. These are in an important building block for many simulations in astrophysics, climate simulations and water management, for instance. The TIDA paper gives more details on the programming model.

This projects aims to achieve several things and answer several research questions:

TIDA currently only works with up to 3D. In many applications we have, higher dimensionalities are needed. Can we generalize the model to N dimensions?
The model currently only supports a two-level hierarchy of data locality. However, modern memory systems often have many more levels, both on CPUs and GPUs (e.g., L1, L2 and L3 cache, main memory, memory banks coupled to a different core, etc). Can we generalize the model to support N-level memory hierarchies?
The current implementation only works on CPUs, can we generalize to GPUs as well?
Given the above generalizations, can we still implement the model efficiently? How should we perform the mapping from the abstract hierarchical model to a real physical memory system?

We want to test the new extended model on a real application. We have examples available in many domains. The student can pick one that is of interest to her/him.

Rob van Nieuwpoort <R.vanNieuwpoort=>uva.nl>

Ethereum Smart Contract Fuzz Testing.

An Ethereum smart contract can be seen as a computer program that runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), with the ability to accept, hold and transfer funds programmatically. Once a smart contract has been place on the blockchain, it can be executed by anyone. Furthermore, many smart contracts accept user input. Because smart contracts operate on a cryptocurrency with real value, security of smart contracts is of the utmost importance. I would like to create a smart contract fuzzer that will check for unexpected behaviour or crashes of the EVM. Based on preliminary research, such a fuzzer does not exist yet.

Rodrigo Marcos <rodrigo.marcos=>secforce.com>

Smart contracts specified as contracts.

Developing a distributed state of mind: from control flow to control structure

The concepts of control flow, of data structure, as well as that of data flow are well established in the computational literature; in contrast, one can find different definitions of control structures, and typically these are not associated to the common use of the term, referring to the power relationships holding in society or in organizations.

The goal of this project is the design and development of a social architecture language that cross-compile in a modern concurrent programming language (Rust, Go, or Scala), in order to make explicit a multi-threaded, distributed state of mind, following results obtained in agent-based programming. The starting point will be a minimal language subset of AgentSpeak(L).

Potential applications: controlled machine learning for Responsible AI, control of distributed computation

Giovanni Sileno <G.Sileno=>uva.nl>
Mosata Mohajeriparizi <m.mohajeriparizi=>uva.nl>

Zero Trust Validation.

ON2IT advocates the Zero Trust Validation conceptual strategy [1] to strengthen information security at the architectural level. Zero Trust is often mistakenly perceived as an architectural approach. However, it is, in the end, a strategic approach towards protecting assets regardless of location. To enable this approach, controls are needed to provide sufficient insight (visibility), to exert control, and to provide operational feedback. However, these controls/probes are not naturally available in all environments. Finding ways to embed such controls, and finding/applying them, can be challenging, especially in the context of containerized, cloud and virtualized workflows.

At the strategic level, Zero Trust is not sufficiently perceived as a value contributor. At the managerial level, it is perceived mainly as an architectural ‘toy’. This makes it hard to translate a Zero Trust strategic approach to the operational level; there’s a lack overall coherence. For this reason, ON2IT developed a Zero Trust Readiness Assessment framework which facilitates testing the readiness level on three levels: governance, management and operations.

Research (sub)questions that emerge:

What is missing in the current approach of ZTA to make it resonate with the board?
- What are Critical Success Factors for drafting and implementing ZTA?
- What is an easy to consume capability maturity or readiness model for the adoption of ZTA that guides boards and management teams in making the right decisions?
- What does a management portal with associated KPIs need to offer in order to enable board and management to manage and monitor the ZTA implementation process and take appropriate ownership?
- How do we add the necessary controls and leverage control and monitoring facilitities thusly provided efficiently?

Jeroen Scheerder <Jeroen.Scheerder=>on2it.net>

OSINT Washing Street.

At the moment more and more OSINT is available via all kinds of sources,a lot them are legit services that are used by malicious actors. Examples are github, pastebin, twitter etc. If you look at pastebin data you might find IOC/TTPS but usually the payloads delivered in many stages so it is important to have a system that follows the path until it finds the real payload. The question here is how can you build a generic pipeline that unravels data like a matryoshka doll. So no matter the input, the pipeline will try to decode, query or perform whatever relevant action that is needed. This would result in better insight in the later stages of an attack. An example of a framework using the method is Stoq (https://github.com/PUNCH-Cyber/stoq), but this lakes research in usability and if the results are added value compared to other osint sources.

Joao Novaismarques <joao.novaismarques=>kpn.com>

Building an open-source, flexible, large-scale static code analyzer.

Background information

Data drives business, and maybe even the world. Businesses that make it their business to gather data are often aggregators of clientside generated data. Clientside generated data, however, is inherently untrustworthy. Malicious users can construct their data to exploit careless, or naive, programming and use this malicious, untrusted data to steal information or even take over systems.
It is no surprise that large companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo spend considerable resources in securing their own systems against wouldbe attackers. Generally, many methods have been developed to make untrusted data cross the trustboundary to trusted data, and effectively make malicious data harmless. However, securing your systems against malicious data often requires expertise beyond what even skilled programmers might reasonably possess.

Problem description

Ideally, tools that analyze code for vulnerabilities would be used to detect common security issues. Such tools, or static code analyzers, exist, but are either outdated (http://ripsscanner.sourceforge.net/) or part of very expensive commercial packages (https://www.checkmarx.com/ and http://armorize.com/). Next to the need for an opensource alternative to the previously mentioned tools, we also need to look at increasing our scope. Rather than focusing on a single codebase, the tool would ideally be able to scan many remote, largescale repositories and report the findings back in an easily accessible way.
An interesting target for this research would be very popular, opensource (at this stage) Content Management Systems (CMSs), and specifically plugins created for these CMSs. CMS cores are held to a very high coding standard and are often relatively secure. Plugins, however, are necessarily less so, but are generally as popular as the CMSs they’re created for. This is problematic, because an insecure plugin is as dangerous as an insecure CMS. Experienced programmers and security experts generally audit the most popular plugins, but this is: a) very timeintensive, b) prone to errors and c) of limited scope, ie not every plugin can be audited. For example, if it was feasible to audit all aspects of a CMS repository (CMS core and plugins), the DigiNotar debacle could have easily been avoided.

Research proposal

Your research would consist of extending our proofofconcept static code analyzer written in Python and using it to scan code repositories, possibly of some major CMSs and their plugins, for security issues and finding innovative ways of reporting on the massive amount of possible issues you are sure to find. Help others keep our data that little bit more safe.

Patrick Jagusiak <patrick.jagusiak=>dongit.nl>
Wouter van Dongen <wouter.vandongen=>dongit.nl>

Developing a Distributed State of Mind.

A system required to be autonomous needs to be more than just a computational black box that produces a set of outputs from a set of inputs. Interpreted as an agent provided with (some degree of) rationality, it should act based on desires, goals and internal knowledge for justifying its decisions. One could then imagine a software agent much like a human being or a human group, with multiple parallel threads of thoughts and considerations which more than often are in conflict with each other. This distributed view contrasts the common centralized view used in agent-based programming,and opens up to potential cross-fertilization with distributed computing applications which for the moment are for the most unexplored.

The goal of this project is the design and development of an efficient agent architecture in a modern concurrent programming language (Rust, Go, or Scala), in order to make explicit a multi-threaded, distributed state of mind.

Giovanni Sileno <G.Sileno=>uva.nl>
Mostafa Mohajeriparizi <m.mohajeriparizi=>uva.nl>

Development of a control framework to guaranty the security of a collaborative open-source project.

We’re now living in an information society, and everyone is expecting to be able to find everything on the Web. IT developers make no exception and spend a large part of their working hours searching for and reusing part of codes found on Public Repositories (e.g. GitHub, Gitlab …) or web forums (e.g. StackOverflow).

The use of open-source software has long been seen as a secure alternative as the code is available for review to everyone, and as a result, bugs and vulnerability should more easily be found and fixed. Multiple incidents related to the use of Open-source software (NPM, Gentoo, Homebrew) have shown that the greater security of open-source components turned out to be theoretical.

This research aims to highlight the root causes of major recent incidents related to open-source collaborative projects, as well as to propose a global open-source security framework that could address those issues.

References:

Tim Dijkhuizen <Dijkhuizen.Tim=>kpmg.nl>
Ruben Koeze <Koeze.Ruben=>kpmg.nl>

Security of IoT communication protocols on the AWS platform.

In January 2020, Jason and Hoang from the OS3 master worked on the project "Security Evaluation on Amazon Web Services’ REST API Authentication Protocol Signature Version 4"[1]. This project has shown the resilience of the Sigv4 authentication mechanism for HTTP protocol communications.
Since June 2017, AWS released a service called AWS Greengrass[2] that can be used as an intermediate server for low connectivity devices running AWS IoT SDK[3]. This is an interesting configuration as it allows to further challenge Sigv4 authentication on a disconnected environment using the MQTT protocol.

Reference:

Tim Dijkhuizen <Dijkhuizen.Tim=>kpmg.nl>
Ruben Koeze <Koeze.Ruben=>kpmg.nl>

Threat modeling on a concrete Digital Data Market.

Security and sovereignty are top concerns for data federations among normally competing organizations. Digital Data Marketplace (DDMs) are emerging as architectures to support this mode of interactions. We have designed an auditable secure network overlay for multi-domain distributed applications to facilitate such trust-worthy data sharing. We prove our concepts with a running demonstration which shows how a simple workflow can run across organizational boundaries.

It is important to know how secure the overlay network is for data federation applications. You will do a threat modeling with a concrete DDM use case.

Discover a detailed outline of attack vectors.
Investigate which attacks are already successfully detected or avoided with current secure mechanisms.
Discover remaining security holes and propose possible countermeasures.

"Zhang, Lu" <l.zhang2=>uva.nl>

Version management of project files in ICS.

Research in Industrial Control Systems: It is difficult to have proper version management of the project files as they usually are stored offline. We would like to come up with a solution to backup and store project files in real time on a server and have the capability to revert back/take snapshots etc. of the versions used. Sort of Puppet/Chef/Ansible but then for ICS.

<mvanveen=>deloitte.nl>

Future tooling and cyber defense strategy for ICS.

Research in Industrial Control Systems: Is zero trust networking possible in ICS? This is one of the questions we are wondering about to sharpen our vision and story around where ICS security is going and which solutions are emerging.

Michel van Veen <mvanveen=>deloitte.nl>

End-to-end encryption for browser-based meeting technologies.

Investigating the possibilities and limitations of end-to-end encrypted browser-based video conferencing. With a specific focus on security and preserving privacy.

What are possible approaches?
How would they compare to each other?

Jan Freudenreich <jfreudenreich=>deloitte.nl>

Evaluation of the Jitsi Meet approach for end-to-end encrypted browser-based video conferencing.

Determining the security of the library, implementation and the environment setup.

Jan Freudenreich <jfreudenreich=>deloitte.nl>

Acceleration of Microsoft SEAL library using dedicated hardware (FPGAs).

Homomorphic encryption allows to process encrypted data making it possible to access services sharing only encrypted information to the service provider. However, performance of homomorphic encryption can be limited for certain applications. The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL) is an homomorphic encryption library (https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL) released as opensource under the MIT license. The overall goal of the project is to improve the performance of the library accelerating it by means of dedicated hardware.

The specific use case consider here is the acceleration of particularly critical routines using reconfigurable hardware (FPGA). The research will address the following challenges:

The profiling of library components to identify the main bottlenecks. The functions that would benefit more from the hardware acceleration will be identified and a small subset of them would be selected.
An optimized hardware architecture for the functions previously selected will be designed and implemented using an hardware description language (VHDL or Verilog)
The performance of the hardware design will be evaluated using state of the art design tools for reconfigurable hardware (FPGA) and the speed up achieved on the overall library will be estimated

Francesco Regazzoni <f.regazzoni=>uva.nl>

High level synthesis and physical attacks resistance.

High level synthesis is a well known approach that allows designers to quickly explore different hardware optimization starting from and high level behavioral code. Despite its widespread use, the effects of such an approach on security have not been explored in depth yet. This project focuses on physical attacks, where the adversary infers secret information exploiting the implementation weaknesses, and aims at exploring the effect of different optimizations of high level synthesis on physical attacks.

The specific use case consider here is the analysis of resistance against physical attacks of particularly critical blocks of cryptography algorithms when implemented in hardware using high level synthesis. The research will address the following challenges:

The selection of the few critical blocks to be explored and the implementation of them using high level behavioral language
The realization of different versions of the previously selected blocks using high level synthesis tools.
The collection (or the simulation) of the traces needed to mount the side channel attack
The security analysis of each version of each block and the analysis of the effects on security of the particular optimization used to produce each version.

Francesco Regazzoni <f.regazzoni=>uva.nl>

Embedded FPGAs (eFPGAs) for security.

Reconfigurable hardware offers the possibility to easily reprogram its functionalities on the field, making it suitable for applications where some flexibility is required. Among these applications, there is certainly cryptography, especially when implemented in embedded and cyber-physical systems. These devices, often, have a life time that is much longer than the usual consumer electronics, thus they need to provide the so called crypto-agility (the capability of update an existing cryptographic algorithm). Reconfigurable hardware is currently designed for general purpose, while better performance could be reached by using reconfigurable blocks specifically designed for cryptography (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/724.pdf). In this project, a design flow open source design tools have to be explored to build a design flow for converting HDL designs into a physical implementation of the algorithm on the novel reconfigurable block.

The specific use case considered here is the exploration of possible architectures for connecting the novel reconfigurable block and the estimation of the overhead of the connections. The research will address the following challenges:

acquire familiarity with the VTR tool and other relevant design tools through discussion with the supervisor, online tutorials and example implementations,
develop a custom design flow for the reconfigurable block presented by Mentens et al.
validate the design flow and the eFPGA architecture though a number of existing cryptographic benchmark circuits.

This thesis is in collaboration with KU Leuven (Prof. Nele Mentens)

Francesco Regazzoni <f.regazzoni=>uva.nl>

Approximate computing and side channels.

Approximate computer is an emerging computing paradigm where the precision of the computation is traded with other metrics such as energy consumption or performance. This paradigm has been shown to be effective in various application, including machine learning and video streaming. However, the effect of approximate computing on security are still unknown. This project investigates the effects of approximate computing paradigm on side channel attacks.

The specific use case consider here is the exploration of the resistance against power analysis attacks of devices when classical techniques used in the approximate computing paradigm to reduce the energy consumption (such as voltage scaling) are applied. The research will address the following challenges:

Selection of the most appropriated techniques for energy saving among the ones used in approximate computing paradigm
Realization of a number of simple cryptographic benchmarks using HDL (VHDL of Verilog) language
Simulation of the power consumption in the different scenarios
Evaluation of the side channel resistance of each

This thesis is in collaboration with University of Stuttgart (Prof. Ilia Polian)

Francesco Regazzoni <f.regazzoni=>uva.nl>

Decentralize a legacy application using blockchain: a crowd journalism case study.

Blockchain technologies demonstrated a huge potential for application developers and operators to improve service trustworthiness, e.g., in logistics, finance and provenance. The migration of a centralized distributed application into a decentralized paradigm often requires not only a conceptual re-design of the application architecture, but also profound understanding of the technical integration between business logic with the blockchain technologies. This project, we will use the social network application (crowd journalism) as a test case to investigate the integration possibilities between a legacy system and the blockchain. Key activities in the project:

investigate the integration possibilities between social network application and permissioned blockchain technologies,
make a rapid prototype to demonstrate the feasibility, and
assess the operational cost of blockchain services.

The software of the crowd journalism will be provided by a SME partner of EU ARTICONF project.

References: http://www.articonf.eu

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Location aware data processing in the cloud environment.

Data intensive applications are often workflow involving distributed data sources and services. When the data volumes are very large, especially with different access constraints, the workflow system has to decide suitable locations to process the data and to deliver the results. In this project, we perform a case study of eco-Lida data from different European countries; the processing will be done using the test bed offered by the European Open Science Cloud. The project will investigate data location aware scheduling strategies, and service automation technologies for workflow execution. The data processing pipeline and data sources in the use case will be provided by partners in the EU Lifewatch, and the test bed will be provided by the European Open Science Cloud earlier adopter program.

Zhiming Zhao <z.zhao=>uva.nl>

Wi-Fi 6 - BSS colouring in the home environment

BSS Colouring aims to significantly improve the end-user experience in terms of throughput and latency in high density wireless environments, for example in urban areas. A major cause of slow working in dense Wi-Fi environments is mutual interference between access points that share the same channel. Wi-Fi copes with this co-channel interference (CCI) by Carrier Sense with Multiple Access Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA): a radio wanting to transmit first listens on its frequency, and if it hears another transmission in process it waits a while before trying again. CCI is not actually an interference but more a sort of congestion. It hinders the performance by increasing the wait time as the same channel is used by different devices. The CCI forces other devices to defer transmissions and wait in a queue until the first device finishes using the transmission line and the channel is free. Even if two APs are too far apart for them to detect each other's transmissions directly, a client of either in between them can effectively trigger collision avoidance when one AP hears it talking to the other. Unnecessary medium contention overhead that occurs when too many Access Points (APs) and clients hear each other on the same channel is called an overlapping basic service set (OBSS).

BSS colouring is a feature in the IEEE 802.11ax standard to address medium contention overhead due to OBSS by assigning a different "colour", a number between 1 and 63 that is added to the PHY header of the 802.11ax frame, to each BSS in an environment. When an 802.11ax radio is listening to the medium and hears the PHY header of an 802.11ax frame sent by another 802.11ax radio, the listening radio will check the BSS colour bit of the transmitting radio. Channel access is dependent on the colour detected:

If the colour bit is the same, then the frame is considered an intra-BSS transmission, and the Preamble Detection (PD) threshold remains unchanged, in other words normal CSMA/CA process is followed.
If the colour is different, then the frame is considered an inter-BSS transmission. The station increases its PD threshold to limit the range of physical carrier sense so as to reduce the chance of contention with the neighbour AP.

This is important because the number of Wi-Fi stations being used continues to increase, and the space between them is decreasing. BSS colouring gives the 802.11ax standard, also labelled Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, the ability to discover spatial reuse opportunities. And spatial reuse can be exploited to enable more parallel conversations within the same physical space.

Our expectation is BSS Colouring will increase Medium Access Control (MAC) efficiency and the user should experience lower latency and an increase in throughput. The noise floor of the operating channel however will deteriorate, reducing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) potentially resulting in a drop in the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) rate. In short, BSS colour improves MAC efficiency at the cost of noise in the physical (PHY) layer. Legacy 802.11a/b/g/n clients and APs will not be able to interpret the colour bits because they use a different PHY header format.

The main research questions are:

What is the impact of using BSS colouring on the performance in terms of throughput and latency of the own and neighbour BSS taking the increased MAC efficiency as well as the increased noise into account?
What is the impact of introducing BSS colouring in the home environment in combination with neighbouring legacy APs and clients?
How does the increased use of mesh Wi-Fi solutions combine with the introduction of BSS colouring?

The students will use the MATLAB WLAN toolbox for simulation, knowledge of MATLAB and the Wi-Fi PHY and MAC layer is key for this research project.

Arjan van der Vegt <avdvegt=>libertyglobal.com>

Trust bootstrapping for secure data exchange infrastructure provisioned on demand.

Data exchange in the data market requires more than just end to end secure connection that is well supported by VPN. Data market and data exchange that could be integrated into complex research, industrial and business processes may require connection to data market and data exchange services supporting data search, combination and quality assurance as well as delivery to data processing or execution facilities. This can be achieved by providing trusted data exchange and execution environment on demand using cloud hosting platform.
This project will (1) investigate current state of the art in trust management, trust bootstrapping and key management in provisioned on demand cloud based services; (2) test several available solutions, and (3) implement a selected solution in a working prototype.

Yuri Demchenko <y.demchenko=>uva.nl>

Supporting infrastructure for distributed data exchange scenarios when using IDS (Industrial Data Spaces) Connector.

This project will investigate the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) Reference Architecture Model (RAM) and the proposed IDS Connector and its applicability to complex data exchange scenarios that involve multiple data sources/suppliers and multiple data consumers in a complex multi-staged data centric workflow.
The project will assess the UCON library providing native IDS Connector implementation, test it in a proposed scenario that supports one of general uses cases for secure and trusted data exchange, and identify necessary infrastructure components to support IDS Connector and RAM such as trust management, data identification and lineage, multi-stage session management, etc.

Yuri Demchenko <y.demchenko=>uva.nl>

Security projects at KPN.

The following are some ideas for RP that we would like to propose from KPN Security. Moreover, I would like to mention that we are open for other ideas as long as those are related to the proposed ones. To give a better impression, I added the "rough ideas" section as example of topics we would be interested to supervise. We are more than happy to assist the students at the moment of finding the right angle for their research.

Info stealer landscape 2021

Create an overview of the info stealer landscape 2020/2021. What stealers are used, how do they work, what are similarities, config extraction of samples, how to detect the info stealers. Hoping this could lead to something similar as https://azorult-tracker.net/ where data is published from automatically analyzing info stealers. An example of what can be used for that is openCTI (https://github.com/OpenCTI-Platform/opencti).

Hacked wordpress sites

In today’s threat landscape several malicious groups including Revil, Emotet, Qakbot and Dridex are using compromised Wordpress website to aid in their operations. This RP would be on analyzing how many of those vulnerable websites are out there using OSINT techniques like urlscan.io, Shodan and Riskiq. Also identifying the vulnerable components and if they are hacked already would help fight this problem. Ideally some notification system is put in place to warn owners and hosting companies about their website.

Rough ideas (freestyle)

Literature review of the state of the art of a give malware category ( Trojans, Info stealers, ransomware, etc) some examples:

What cloud services are been the most abused to for distributing malware? (Pastebin, GitHub, drive, Dropbox, etc) . URLHaus, Public sandboxes, and other sources could be starting points. (Curious about cdns and social applications like discord, telegram , and others)
Looking at raccine https://github.com/Neo23x0/Raccine, what steps do ransomware malware take and what possibilities are there to create other vaccines or how to improve Raccine.
Building a non detectable web scraper

A lot of time data from darknet is available on website and no option for an API/feed is available. These website tend to have scraping detection is several ways, this could be rate limiting to "human" behavior checks. What is the best way to scrape these type of website in such a way that is is hard to impossible to detect a bot is retrieving data. Can this be done while still maintaining a good pace of retrieving data.

Malware Aquarium

Inspired by XKCD: https://xkcd.com/350/. Can you create an open source malware aquarium. There are several challenges in how to setup up, how to get infection going, keeping it contained and how to keep track of everything (alerts on changes)?

Joao Novaismarques <joao.novaismarques=>kpn.com>

Assessing data remnants in modern smartphones after factory reset.

Description:

Factory reset is a function built in modern smartphones which restores the settings of a device to the state it was shipped from the factory. While its user data becomes inaccessible through the device's user interface, research performed in 2018 reports that mobile forensic techniques can still recover old data even after a smartphone undergoes factory reset.

In recent smartphones, however, multiple security measures are implemented by the vendors due to growing concerns over security and privacy. The implementation of encryption is especially supposed to be effective for protecting user data from an attacker after factory reset. In the meantime, its impact on the digital forensics domain has not yet been explored.

In this project, the effectiveness of factory reset to digital forensics will be evaluated using modern smartphones. Using the latest digital forensic techniques, data remnants in factory reset smartphones are investigated, and its applicability to forensic domain will be evaluated.

Related research:

Zeno Geradts <zeno=>holmes.nl>
Aya Fukami <ayaf=>safeguardcyber.com>

Assessing data remnants in modern smartphones after factory reset.

Factory reset is a function built in modern smartphones which restores the settings of a device to the state it was shipped from the factory. While its user data becomes inaccessible through the device's user interface, research performed in 2018 reports that mobile forensic techniques can still recover old data even after a smartphone undergoes factory reset.

In recent smartphones, however, multiple security measures are implemented by the vendors due to growing concerns over security and privacy. The implementation of encryption is especially supposed to be effective for protecting user data from an attacker after factory reset. In the meantime, its impact on the digital forensics domain has not yet been explored.

In this project, the effectiveness of factory reset to digital forensics will be evaluated using modern smartphones. Using the latest digital forensic techniques, data remnants in factory reset smartphones are investigated, and its applicability to forensic domain will be evaluated.

Related research:

https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/41441
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fr_most15.pdf
https://ld7un47f5ww196i744fd5pi1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/201811-SSpaper-DataRemanence.pdf

Zeno Geradts <zeno=>holmes.nl>
Aye Fukami <ayaf=>safeguardcyber.com>

Vocal Fakes.

Deep fakes are in the news, especially those where real people are being copied. You see that really good deepfakes use doubles and voice actors. Audio deepfakes are not that good yet, and the available tools are mainly trained on the English language.
> Voice clones can be used for good (for example, for ALS patients), but also for evil, such as in CEO fraud. It is important for the police to know the latest state of affairs, on the one hand to combat crime (think not only of fraud, but also of access systems where the voice is used as biometric access controls). But there are also applications where the police can use voice cloning.
The central question is what the latest state of technology is, specifically also for the Dutch language, what the most important players are and what are the starting points for recognizing it and… to make a demo application with which the possibilities can be demonstrated.
On the internet Corentin real time voice cloning is promoted, with which you can create your own voicecloning framework, so that you can also clone other people's voices, this repository on Github was open-sourced last year, as an implementation of this research paper about a real-time working "vocoder". Perhaps a good starting point?

Zeno Geradts <zeno=>holmes.nl>

Web of Deepfakes.

According to the well-known magazine Wired, Text Synthesis is at least as great a threat as deepfakes. Thanks to a new language model, called GPT-3, it has now become much easier to analyze entered texts and generate variants and extensions in large volumes. This can be used for guessing passwords, automating social engineering and in many forms of scams (friend-in-need fraud) and extortion.
It is therefore not expected that this will be used to create incidents like deepfakes, but to create a web of lies, disguised as regular conversations on social media. This can also undermine the sincerity of online debate. Europol also warns against text synthesis because it allows the first steps of phishing and fraud to be fully automated.
A lot of money is also invested in text synthesis from marketing and services. For chatbots, but also because you can tailor campaigns with the specific language use of your target group. This technology can also be used by criminals.
The central question is what the latest state of affairs is, what the most important players are and what are the starting points for recognizing text synthesis in, for example, fraudulent emails / chats, and for (soon) distinguishing real people from chatbots. Perhaps interesting to build your own example in slang or for another domain?

Zeno Geradts <zeno=>holmes.nl>

Comparing the functionality of the state-of-the-art software switches in a data sharing platform.

A container-based data-sharing platform is a dynamic environment. There are various rules and policies in this platform that may change at any time. In addition, according to the network requirements sometimes it is needed to change routing decisions that are set between containers. Therefore, a container-based data sharing platform has to be programmable that can manage and reconfigure container connections and filtering rules when it is necessary. Currently available technologies for managing the container’s connection cannot provide the mentioned requirements.

Using a programmable switch can be the solution for managing the container connections in a data-sharing platform. However, there are multiple programmable switches with different characteristics. Considering security, agility in operation, performance, and scalability as the main requirements, we need to know which programmable switch suits such sharing platform and can handle the requirements better.

Related references:

Sara Shakeri <s.shakeri=>uva.nl>

Zero Trust architectures applications in the University ICT environment.

Traditionally security in ICT is managed by creating zones where within that zone everything is trusted to be secure and security is seen as defending the inside from attacks originating from the outside. For that purpose firewall's and intrusion detection systems are used. That model is considered broken. One reason is that a significant part of the security incidents are inside jobs with grave consequences. Another reason is that even good willing insiders (employees) may inadvertently become the source of an incident because of phishing or brute force hacking. For organizations such as the university an additional problem is that an ever changing population of students, (guest) researchers, educators and staff with wildly varying functions and goals (education, teaching, research and basic operations) put an enormous strain on the security and integrity of the ICT at the university. A radical different approach is to trust nothing and start from that viewpoint. This rp is to create an overview of zero-trust literature and propose a feasible approach & architecture that can work at the University scale of about 40000 persons.

Roeland Reijers <r.reijers=>uva.nl>
Cees de Laat <C.T.A.M.deLaat=>uva.nl>

SNE Master LeftOver Projects 2020 - 2021

Blockchain's Relationship with Sovrin for Digital Self-Sovereign Identities.

Sensor data streaming framework for Unity.

To optimize or not: on the impact of architectural optimizations on network performance.

The other faces of RDMA virtualization.

Verification of Objection Location Data through Picture Data Mining Techniques.

Artificial Intelligence Assisted carving.

Problem Description:

Goal:

Usage Control in the Mobile Cloud.

Security of embedded technology.

Cross-blockchain oracle.

Network aware performance optimization for Big Data applications using coflows.

Elastic data services for time critical distributed workflows.

Contextual information capture and analysis in data provenance.

Profiling Partitioning Mechanisms for Graphs with Different Characteristics.

Auto-Tuning for GPU Pipelines and Fused Kernels.

Auto-tuning for Power Efficiency.

Applying and Generalizing Data Locality Abstractions for Parallel Programs.

Ethereum Smart Contract Fuzz Testing.

Smart contracts specified as contracts.

Zero Trust Validation.

OSINT Washing Street.

Building an open-source, flexible, large-scale static code analyzer.

Background information

Problem description

Research proposal

Developing a Distributed State of Mind.

Development of a control framework to guaranty the security of a collaborative open-source project.

Security of IoT communication protocols on the AWS platform.

Threat modeling on a concrete Digital Data Market.

Version management of project files in ICS.

Future tooling and cyber defense strategy for ICS.

End-to-end encryption for browser-based meeting technologies.

Evaluation of the Jitsi Meet approach for end-to-end encrypted browser-based video conferencing.

Acceleration of Microsoft SEAL library using dedicated hardware (FPGAs).

High level synthesis and physical attacks resistance.

Embedded FPGAs (eFPGAs) for security.

Approximate computing and side channels.

Decentralize a legacy application using blockchain: a crowd journalism case study.

Location aware data processing in the cloud environment.

Wi-Fi 6 - BSS colouring in the home environment

Trust bootstrapping for secure data exchange infrastructure provisioned on demand.

Supporting infrastructure for distributed data exchange scenarios when using IDS (Industrial Data Spaces) Connector.

Security projects at KPN.

Assessing data remnants in modern smartphones after factory reset.

Assessing data remnants in modern smartphones after factory reset.

Vocal Fakes.

Web of Deepfakes.

Comparing the functionality of the state-of-the-art software switches in a data sharing platform.

Zero Trust architectures applications in the University ICT environment.