Cybersecurity challenges are innumerable: from advanced and nation-state malware, evolving evasive attack techniques, to the new frontiers of IoT security, access control, and physical security. In reaction to this, SEC’s approach to system security covers offensive and defensive aspects of system security, targeting concrete security problems and addressing the underlying, fundamental issues. SEC’s strength lies in its ability to empirically and theoretically understand the full security process: from attack generation and system management, to policy specification and user aspects.

Research in the Security (SEC) group spans three areas vital to the security of decentralized and embedded systems:

• Security policy specification & enforcement
• Security of embedded systems
• Threat intelligence and defense

SEC sits at the intersection of these areas, addressing challenging operative and theoretical problems: for example, by monitoring underground activities and studying the techno-economic principles driving attack production, SEC maintains a unique perspective on the offensive side of computer security. This understanding is channeled into novel approaches such as new monitoring techniques to detect attacks targeting IT and IoT systems and new adaptive security and authentication mechanisms. SEC has made significant contributions to secure key storage in embedded systems by devising algorithms for randomness extraction from Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Furthermore, SEC pioneered Quantum Readout of PUFs, an object authentication technology that is immune to spoofing.

Scientific staff:  S. Etalle (HGL, 0.6 fte), W. Michiels (d-HLG, 0.2 fte), M. Petkovic (d-HLG, 0.2 fte), N. Zannone (UHD), L. Allodi (UD), J. den Hartog (UD), B. Škorić (UD), S. Sciancalepore (UD), E. Zambon (Researcher)

PhD students: A. Aarts, P. Burda, M. Campobasso, S. Clark, G.F.C. Dupont, A. Gallucci, B. Joudeh, L. Kersten, Ch. Leite da Silva, V. Liventsev, G. Mehri, M. Rosso, D.R. George, S. Kempinski