Projects and Final Theses

The Distributed Systems Group has disbanded at the end of the 2019/20 winter semester, and will not be offering any further degree theses. Please find below some of the interesting topics our students have worked on in the past.

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[Master] Feasibility of Mix Networks for Instant Messaging

End to End encryption protects message contents, but communication metadata can (and is) still be used to identify the communicating parties. Mix networks unlink sender and receiver using layered encryption and delaying messages. This thesis analyzes whether the delays introduced can still cover today's low-latency Instant Messaging use cases.

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[Master] Ransomware Detection

Ransomware attacks – in contrast to other cyber attacks – must not be detected and especially not blocked or recovered on first sight. This relaxation is supported by the rareness of ransomware attacks. Certainly, the uprising of ransomware families, which are able to circumvent the detection mechanism, integrated into the local machine, prevents the approaches from taking advantage of the relaxation. Justified by the attack isolation, the move to the personal cloud storage is the reasonable way…

[Master] Design and Analysis of a secure multi-party communication protocol

In the past years digital communication became an important aspect in every day life. Everything is shared and discussed in groups of friends, family or business part- ners without a proper way to protect that information. This master thesis introduces the first secure robust multi-party communication protocol which mimics a physical conversation with the help of a Diffie-Hellman key tree and social behaviours. Robust- ness against offline group members is reached by taking advantage of…

[Bachelor] Mapping different datatypes ensuring secure cloud storage

In this thesis two generic approaches on how to store different datatypes to a cloud storage are proposed, thereby utilizing Treetank. As part of this thesis implementations for the proposed approaches have been implemented to evaluate their practicability and search out strengths as well as weaknesses. Current cloud storage systems, security concerns towards privacy, stability and integrity of data shared with “the Cloud” is discussed. An overview of Treetank, that originally was designed to be…