Advanced Seminar Embedded Systems and Internet of Things

This semester we offer the following nine topics for the advanced seminar "Embedded Systems and Internet of Things":

1. Specification for Container Based Software Architectures
2. Verification in Distributed Systems using "Sniffing" Methodologies
3. Self-Adaptive Networked Distributed Systems
4. Checkpointing and Rollback-Recovery in Distributed Systems
5. Reliability-Aware Synthesis for Distributed Systems using Task Replication
6. Graceful Degradation in Distributed Systems
7. Blockchain-based Intersection Management
8. LMS – Post Quantum Hash-based Signature Scheme
9. Cryptographic Key Management for Smaller Short-Term Keys

You will find the description of the topics below. Furthermore, we put a reference paper for each topic as a starting point for your research. Your task for each topic will be to read and analyze several references, get an overview of the current state-of-the-art and summarize your findings in a paper-style report. Afterwards you will present your findings in a short talk in front of your fellow students.

During the seminar you will also learn how to conduct the research, how to write a scientific paper and how to present your work.

 

Topic Assignment

We have one unassigned topic (description below): Verification in Distributed Systems using "Sniffing" Methodologies. If you are interested in this topic feel free to come to the kick-off meeting, where we will assign this last topic.

 

Kick-off meeting

The kick-off meeting will be on the 16th of October at 9:45 in room 4981. We ask all selected participants who have been assigned a topic to be present in the kick-off meeting. Please notify us in case you can not make it to the meeting, otherwise we will give your place to another applicant.

 

Topics

Specification for Container Based Software Architectures

Containers are a new form of software encapsulation that are commonly compared to Virtual Machines. They are very lightweight and more suited for resource constrained devices compared to Virtual Machines. The student needs to start by understanding the container technology. After that he/she needs to research the state of the art for how a container can be specified. It is encouraged to relate the container specification to the specification of an IoT device.

Reference: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotcloud16/hotcloud16_burns.pdf

Supervisor: Ege Korkan

Topic assigned

 

Verification in Distributed Systems using "Sniffing" Methodologies

Verification of products (software, hardware) is a very important phase in the development cycle and also during deployment to detect faults. For networked entities (a device or a software), there are verification methods relying on sending messages and analyzing their returns. However, for resource constrained devices, verifying them by simply sending verification requests does not fit the resource constraints e.g. draining battery just for verifying the device. Instead, there are methods that allow to listen to the exchanged messages between two networked entities and thus verifying them. By starting from the provided research paper, the student needs to analyze what is the state of the art of such methods and shed light to their limitations. It is encouraged to showcase what methods require the modification (of the code) of the networked devices.

Reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6032620/

Supervisor: Ege Korkan

Topic unassigned

 

Self-Adaptive Networked Distributed Systems

Adapting to changes and failures in systems is an interesting topic in many research fields. In this paper, the student will focus on the state-of-the-art of networked distributed systems. He/She needs to identify some of the deterministic methods to adapt to changes in the system. Most of these methods design architectures that are specific for that given method. The work needs to conclude by identifying what are common parts/methods/ideas in these different architectures in order to show the general trend in this field.

Reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4815212/

Supervisor: Ege Korkan

Topic assigned

 

Checkpointing and Rollback-Recovery in Distributed Systems

Safety-critical applications have to function correctly even in the presence of faults. Transient faults are the most common faults and the hardware becomes more prone due to transistor and voltage scaling. A well-known technique to cope with transient errors is checkpointing and rollback-recovery. However, with this technique consistency problems between the states of processes arise. In addition, for cost-constrained embedded systems as in the automotive domain design optimizations are necessary to optimize reliability and costs. In this work the student should investigate the general challenges as well as the challenges of design optimizations with checkpointing and rollback-recovery.

Reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4757196/

Supervisor: Philipp Weiß

Topic assigned

 

Reliability-Aware Synthesis for Distributed Systems using Task Replication

Many approaches use task replication in order to increase the system reliability in terms of both permanent and transient faults. For that, tasks are deployed redundantly on a system architecture. In this work the student should investigate reliability-aware design optimizations which use task replication, preferably but not limited for distributed systems.

Reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1342457/

Supervisor: Philipp Weiß

Topic assigned

 

Graceful Degradation in Distributed Systems

In case of permanent hardware errors a system might not be able to carry out all its applications. However, safety-critical applications need to stay fail-operational even in the presence of hardware failures. In such a case, graceful degradation techniques can be used, to shut down less critical applications and free sufficient resources for more critical applications.

Reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5090681/

Supervisor: Philipp Weiß

Topic assigned

 

Blockchain-based Intersection Management

Combining Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) and blockchain-based application concepts enables transparent, self-managed and decentralized systems. Intelligent vehicles (IV) could use the blockchain to reach consensus about the right of way at intersections.

Reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308039102_Self-managed_and_blockchain-based_vehicular_ad-hoc_networks

Supervisor: Emanuel Regnath

Topic assigned

 

LMS – Post Quantum Hash-based Signature Scheme 

Quantum computing poses challenges to public key signatures as we know them today. LMS and XMSS are two hash based signature schemes that have been proposed in the IETF as quantum secure. However, they require a larger key and signature size, which might pose a problem for the limited memories of embedded devices.

Reference: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mcgrew-hash-sigs-11

Supervisor: Emanuel Regnath

Topic assigned

 

Cryptographic Key Management for Smaller Short-Term Keys

Public key cryptography is essential for decentralized systems such as IoT platforms. With supercomputers and cloud computing on the one side and billions of highly constrained devices on the other side, the discrepancy between available computational power and communication bandwidth introduces a trade-off between the required difficulty to withstand attacks and the required efficiency to run the cryptography on embedded devices. We want to investigate the idea to use keys of different size and computational complexity and manage them in a smart way to ensure a sufficient security level. Instead of using one large key (e.g RSA 4096) all the time, we could use a shorter, less secure key that is updated more often.

Reference: https://ed25519.cr.yp.to/ed25519-20110926.pdf

Supervisor: Emanuel Regnath 

Topic assigned