We always look forward to collaborating with motivated students at any level. Our theses typically focus on theoretical and practical aspects of security assurance, certification, risk management, and artificial intelligence. All our theses consist of a theoretical and practical part, this split varies depending on the student (BSc, MSc) and the topic. In addition, the distinction between bachelor and master theses is not sharp (for instance, a BSc thesis can be extended). Prerequisites do not need to be acquired before starting the thesis. If you are interested in one of the following theses, as well as any other theses fitting the aforementioned topics, just contact us by email.
Index
Bachelor Theses
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Lightweight Techniques for Poisoning Detection
One of the threats affecting machine learning (ML) is poisoning, where an attacker alters (poisons) the dataset such that the predictions of the resulting model change. There are several approaches to mitigate this threat, including the detection of poisoned data points, where the dataset is inspected according to some techniques and suspicious data points are flagged. The goal of the thesis is to design and implement novel techniques for poisoning detection. These techniques should balance the quality of the results and performance overhead.
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Implementation of an IoT Environment to Simulate Assurance Activities
The goal of the thesis is to design and implement in a simulated/emulated/virtualized environment a small to medium-scale IoT system. The simulator should be easy configurable and allow the creation of IoT systems resembling as much as possible a real-world IoT system, for instance in terms of type of devices. The resulting systems will be used in the experimental evaluation of novel assurance methodologies.
Master Theses
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Fine-Grained Cost Model for Certification-Ready Systems
The goal of the thesis is to extend the work in our paper Bridging the Gap Between Certification and Software Development, where we defined a methodology to develop a software that, once realized, exhibits strong quality of non-functional properties, and, in turn, can be certified with low cost. In particular, the thesis should investigate i) the integration of cost models such as COCOMO within our methodology, ii) the refinement of the existing optimization methodology to balance between strength and cost.
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Discovery and Inference of Non-Functional Properties from a Running System
Existing certification schemes assume the existence of a detailed certification model specifying the certification process in details, namely the non-functional (e.g., confidentiality) property to certify, the target of certification, and the tests to execute to collect evidence that the target of certification supports the non-functional property. As we are moving towards lightweight techniques, this assumption no longer holds. For instance, in highly-dynamic scenarios where system components are composed at run time, not all components are individually certified and drive the composition according to their certificates. The goal of the thesis is to design a methodology where non-functional properties to certify or system components are inferred at run and certification time.
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Trust Negotiation in Modern Distributed Systems
Modern distributed systems are multi-cloud, dynamic, and based on run time composition of heterogeneous (micro and nano)services. It is increasingly important to guarantee non-functional properties of each participating service as well as of the resulting composition to ensure, for instance, Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and, in general, a trustworthy distributed system. However, existing techniques for trust negotiation and remote attestation needs to be re-designed, accounting for the dynamic and multi-cloud nature of these systems.
The goal of this thesis is to investigate the problem of trust management in heterogeneous services deployment in multi-cloud environments to ensure the trustworthiness of services compositions on the basis of existing certification techniques. This goal involves:
- the enhancement of traditional trust negotiation protocols and indices computation for services and data deployed on different clouds towards smart compositions that rely on certification-based trust negotiation;
- an approach based on (security) evaluation and negotiation for composing services according to service level objectives and certifying resulting compositions.
This thesis is an international collaboration between SESAR Lab and LIRIS-INSA (Lyon, France).