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See below the latest news regarding the CSG:
The CSG presented a full and a short paper each at the IEEE LCN 2022 in Edmonton, Canada, during its 47th instance run, here in a hybrid mode after two years of fully virtual operations.
The 94th IFIP TC6 Meeting took place yesterday on July 21, 2022, the 4th in a row still on-line. Burkhard Stiller, the current IFIP TC6 Chair, acted as the virtual host and did welcome National Representatives and Work Group Chairs for their annual reports as well as discussions on the new budget plans for 2023.
The 24th IEEE International Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2022) - hosted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 15-17, 2022 - provided fertile grounds for research with high impact and a hub for multidisciplinary research with contributions from Management Science, Organization Science, Economics, Information Systems, Computer Science, and Informatics. The CSG was represented by Muriel Franco with the work entitled "SecRiskAI: a Machine Learning-based Approach for Cybersecurity Risk Prediction in Businesses", presented in the first section of the conference and co-authored by Erion Sula, Alberto Huertas, Eder Scheid, Lisandro Granville, and Burkhard Stiller.
The CSG will be able to host one Swiss Excellence Scholarship student within the 2022 to 2023 time period, granted by the Swiss federal government annually. The Ph.D. student Ms Nasim Nejadsistani in Electrical Engineering from the Isfahan University of Technology, Iran, will start the one-year research fellowship at the University of Zurich UZH from September 2022 onward.
The CSG was present at this year's 4th IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC 2022), May 2-5, 2022, which was held as a virtual conference, although planned for Shanghai, China, originally. The conference included bleeding-edge topics on all facets of public Blockchains and Distributed Ledger research, including one fascinating one out of three keynote talks on "Data Sovereignty and Decentralized Data Science in Web3" by Dawn Song, UC Berkeley, U.S.A.
The CSG was represented by a successful full paper submission and its respective presentation. On the first ICBC day, the Session on "Technical Session: Privacy, Security and Trust I" took place with five presentations, including the CSG work on "ProvotuMn: Decentralized, Mix-Net-based, and Receipt-free Voting System" by Christian Killer, Moritz Eck, Bruno Rodrigues, Jan von der Assen, Roger Staubli, and Burkhard Stiller. The presentation by Christian Killer took place online in a Zoom session with more than 30 attendees, and related discussion boards were set up using the Whova platform.
The 18th IFIP/IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2022) - hosted by Pal Varga's BME team in Budapest, Hungary, April 25-29, 2022 - targeted at the "Network and Service Management in the Era of Cloudification, Softwarization, and Artificial Intelligence" as the main theme and has shown a number of related keynote presentations as well as technical paper, mini-conference, demo, dissertation digest, experience, short paper sessions, and panels.
During NOMS, the CSG was represented by Muriel Franco, Alberto Huertas, Eder Scheid, and Burkhard Stiller on-site and Sina Rafati remotely. The CSG members attended different technical sessions during the five days of the conference, including the joint meeting of the IEEE Communication Society Technical Committee on Network Operation and Management (CNOM) and IFIP's Working Group WG6.6 on "Management of Networks and Distributed Systems". Furthermore, Burkhard Stiller was one of the two PhD Dissertation Digest Co-chairs (besides Alberto Schaeffer Filho, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul UFRGS) and he did chair one of the mini-conference sessions and the first PhD Dissertation Digest session.
The Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zurich UZH presented at the 17th Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services Conference (WONS 2022), the article entitled "PMD-Track: Portable Medical Devices’ Real-time Inventory and Tracking".
The "Analysis and Classification of Cyberattack Traffic using the SecGrid Platform" demo paper by Jan von der Assen, Muriel Franco, Bruno Rodrigues, and Burkhard Stiller of the Communication Systems Group CSG at the 46th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2021), October 4-7, 2021, Edmonton, Canada, on-line was awarded the Best Demo Award!
The joint article called "WeTrace: A Privacy-preserving Tracing Approach" prepared by the CSG@IfI and the Papers AG was published as an open-access article in the Special Issue "Communications and Networking Approaches for Combating COVID-19" of the Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN). This publication results from academia and industry collaborations that started to address an issue raised during the COVID-19 pandemic: the contact tracing of infected people.
The 17th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Network and Service Management 2021 (IM 2021) was planned to be held in Bordeaux, France, May 17-21, 2021. However, here the pandemic moved as well all presentations and sessions during that time in May into a full week of online mode interactions.
The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency in 2021 (ICBC 2021) was planned to be held in the oldest and biggest Australian city, Sydney. However, the pandemic moved all presentations and session in the time of May 3-6, 2021 into an on-line mode.
Within the first 2021 meeting of IFIP's Technical Committee on "Communication Systems" (TC6) on March 29, 2021 - the second fully on-line meeting overall - the group of TC6 National Representatives and Working Group Chairs, Vice-Chairs, and Secretaries had suggested to the IFIP President to re-appoint Burkhard Stiller into his second term as TC6 Chair. While Andrea Passarella - outgoing WG6.3 Chair - and Eduard Dundler - IFIP Secretary - handled that nomination and consensus finding at the respective agenda item, Burkhard as the current TC6 chair stayed out of all discussions. Upon informing the IFIP President that afternoon, he re-appointed Burkhard that same day.
The tool "SERviz: a Security Economic and Risk Visualizer Tool" has been presented as one of the contributions of Task 4.3 (Economic Perspectives) of the European H2020 CONCORDIA project for the year 2020. Muriel Franco represented the Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI at the University of Zurich UZH at project meetings at which he showed a live demo of the tool and explained its main features for the entire project, including partners from different industry sectors and universities.
Sina Rafati and Clemens Jeger, presenting a paper each, represented the Communication Systems Group (CSG), Department of Informatics (IfI) of the University of Zurich (UZH) at The Second International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications (BCCA 2020). The conference was realized online -- as usual for conferences in 2020 -- upon the entire day of November 3, 2020.
Muriel Franco represented the Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI at the University of Zurich UZH at the 16th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2020) during November 2-6, 2020. The CNSM was run this year as an on-line event, due to the COVID-19 situation.
The work on "SecBot: a Business-Driven Conversational Agent for Cybersecurity Planning and Management" was presented during the Mini Conference 1 "Security and Privacy" on the last day of the conference.
Eryk Schiller represented the Communication Systems Group (CSG), Department of Informatics (IfI) of the University of Zurich (UZH) at the 16th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob'20) upon October 12-14, 2020. As usual for conferences in 2020, WiMob'20 was organized as a fully virtual event due to COVID-19.
"Design and Evaluation of an SDR-based LoRa Cloud Radio Access Network" is a paper written as part of the master thesis conducted by Silas Weber and supervised by Eryk Schiller in 2019/2020. Long Range (LoRa) defines a popular modulation scheme based on the chirp spread spectrum technique. It is used in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WANs) for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This work here designs, specifies, implements, and evaluates a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture for LoRa networks, while using Software Defined Radios (SDR) to receive/send radio signals and Docker to virtualize the setup. Furthermore, a software modulator is developed to emit signals on the downlink targeting regular LoRa end-device receivers such as Semtech SX1276 chips.
Voting run via mail-in ballots is well known across the Globe, like in Switzerland. And many people believe that this traditional system is considered secure by definition. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily secure.
The Communication Systems Group CSG at the Department of Informatics IfI, namely Christian Killer and Burkhard Stiller, had published a paper at E-Vote-ID 2019 on "The Swiss Postal Voting Process and its System and Security Analysis" last year and continued working in that field, closely related with Melchior Limacher, an Information Technology (IT) security specialist.
Due to past weekend's larger set of public votes in Switzerland, the question of secure E-Voting or secure IT voting components surfaced again, and resulted in an article from the Republik, a digital magazine for politics, economy, society, and culture in Switzerland, on "Passwort: «Wahlen»", which indicated in short "Our [the Swiss] democracy is based on paper, thus, secure [] ... a myth." (original in German) and referred to the CSG paper, too. Additionally, this was backed by an overview of the technical background (in German).
On Friday, September 25, 2020, SRF, the public Swiss Radio, and TV took up this topic in "10vor10", the news broadcast of the day in Switzerland. The 4.30 min overview on "Old Software and Security Vulnerabilities" (in German) - backed by statements from Christian Killer and Melchior Limacher - were contrasted with views expressed from authorities of the Canton of Schaffhausen.
While the public needs to very carefully distinguish between E-Voting in general (with various formats and systems) as well as technical support systems, backing the paper-based ballot approach for instance, in terms of counting, results transmissions, plausibility checks and visualizations, these two views document that IT has long made it into many paper-based process steps of paper-based voting procedures at various levels, in different components, with different ranges.
The two interesting questions in general now are concerned with a decision on (a) who takes responsibility for the security for such support IT system components in E-Voting and (b) which security guidelines and regulations have to be applied? At this very moment, clarity has not yet been reached, since a confederation with Federal Offices in Berne, the Cantons with their local set-ups, and municipalities with even more specifics do see in many cases as of today a smaller or larger freedom of decisions in favor of or against certain technical IT components.
CSG's work on E-Voting had been summarized on its research pages.
Muriel Franco represented the Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI at the University of Zurich UZH at the 17th International Conference on the Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Service (GECON 2020) during September 15-17, 2020, as usual during these times organized as a fully on-line event, due to the COVID-19 situation.
The work on "ProtectDDoS: A Platform for Trustworthy Offering and Recommendation of Protections" received for its on-line presentation the GECON 2020 "Best Presentation Award" during the GECON's award ceremony. The work presented was developed as part of the bachelor thesis conducted by Erion Sula and supervised by Muriel during late 2019.
The Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI, at the University of Zurich UZH recently published a full fledged view on the blockchain-based collaborative defense system, BloSS, and its major results.
The paper available in Springer's Journal of Network and Systems Management outlines that in BloSS members of a collaborative defense perform the on-chain signaling of DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack information, establishing bilateral contracts defining the terms of a mitigation service. BloSS stimulates the cooperative behavior in the collaborative defense environment by providing valuable incentives defined in terms of the mitigation service contract and combining it with a reputation system in its protocol for the bilateral evaluation of the service.
The challenge between transparency and data confidentiality is addressed on the BloSS platform with a hybrid approach, combining the declaration of on-chain metadata and the transmission of encrypted and signed off-chain data, so that it is possible to strike a balance in this trade-off. In this way, BloSS establishes a new cooperative approach so that the defense of large-scale DDoS attacks is as widely distributed as the attack itself.
Further technical information are accessible at the CSG's research pages.
WeTrace specifies a Bluetooth Low Energy (BTE)-based approach to fully preserve the user's identity and, thus, privacy of the person and his/her medical status data, while also allowing for a fully anonymous reporting between users, who had been in close contact for a certain period of time, such that their and only their medical status update can be interpreted correctly and reliably.
CSG attended the 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing with two papers of "Design and Implementation of Cast-as-intended Verifiability for a Blockchain-based Voting System" by Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, Raphael Matile, Eder Scheid, Burkhard Stiller, and "Toward Scalable Blockchains with Transaction Aggregation" by Sina Rafati Niya, Fabio Maddaloni, Thomas Bocek, and Burkhard Stiller.
The two papers from CSG were accepted in the Decentralized Applications with Blockchain, DLT and Crypto-Currencies (DAPP) track. Due to the measures taken confronting the extraordinary situations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the SAC 20 with its 42 tracks held fully virtually, so did the papers' presentations, which all performed online via the pre-recorded presentations.
Research on distributed systems and mainly on blockchains have been presented in the two specific sessions under the Decentralized Applications with Blockchain, DLT and Crypto-Currencies DAPP and Dependable, Adaptive, and Secure Distributed Systems DADS tracks. Other Tracks had a focus on IoT, software engineering, cloud computing, business models, Cyber-physical systems and other highly attractive topics being presented online, too.
PasWITS - Passive Wireless Intelligence Tracking System - is a research project exploring two fundamental points from a business point of view: (1) the capture of passively device data and its identification, and (2) data correlation and visualization, which involves the correlation of devices and users and prediction of scenarios (i.e., prediction of events and exhibition performance).
CSG's representative Muriel Franco was running the second keynote on Concordia's Open Door event October 16-17, 2019, which took place in Luxembourg. This keynote entitled "Update on Economic Aspects of Cybersecurity" focused within Concordia on the economic aspects of cybersecurity. Muriel discussed problems plaguing cybersecurity from an economic perspective. Also, two new approaches were presented: (a) SEConomy framework for economic assessment in cybersecurity and (b) a system to recommend protection based on particularly customer demands. As an integral part of this keynote Aljosa Pasic, Atos, Spain, provided an overview regarding past European Union EU projects on the cross cut of economics and cybersecurity.
The Open Door event was attended by a larger number of people from the industry, governments, and universities. This was an excellent opportunity to strengthen the collaborations between the different sectors working for the EU sovereign in cybersecurity, which include the University of Zurich UZH.
This year's LCN 2019 (IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks) took place in Osnabrück, Germany, and accounted for an attendance of approximately 1501 people from the computer networks research area, spread across academia and industry. The myriad of topics presented ranged from wireless underground sensor networks to TCP in high speeds networks (e.g., 100 Gbit/s enabled networks). Even though the blockchain topic was not explicitly mentioned in LCN's call for papers, it was discussed in 5 full papers and 2 posters, addressing its usage in applications on IoT-enabled environments, its employment to provide privacy in charging connected electric vehicles, and to implement access control in sensors from smart cities.
The full paper presentation on "The Swiss Postal Voting Process and its System and Security Analysis" by Christian Killer, Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zurich UZH did run at the E-VOTE ID 2019 Conference in the Session on the "Swiss Voting Experience". This work had been supported partly by UZH and partly by the Concordia EU Project.
This year's E-VOTE ID had around 100 attendees, combining companies and academics interested in eVoting topics from a technical and organizational perspective. The interest in the Swiss Postal Voting Security was considerably large, since no prior work described so gar potential threat events on a postal voting schemes, here the Swiss one. Specifically, the discussion of an IT-based security and risk analysis applied revealed many interesting facts of a highly distributed, human-centric, but partially technology-supported, and plausibility check-driven voting.
Thus, the discussions on eVoting in general revealed clearly that different countries act very differently with respect to highly diverging security, privacy, and organizational requirements. Particularly the Swiss postal voting case served as reliable, though, people-driven, distributed trust model, which has many municipality and cantonal differences to handle. Therefore, many personal interactions with Swiss representatives of the Swiss Bundeskanzlei, the Swiss Post, BFH, Geneva chVote, the Swiss Army, and selected companies discussed various facets of "The Swiss Postal Voting Process and its System and Security Analysis".
The City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich and Zurich Tourism, in cooperation with - among others - the University of Zurich UZH, the Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Korea as well local Seoul partners including the Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Sogang University organize a Festival of "Two Cities" is the fifth edition of a global celebration series connecting Zurich with some of the most inspirational cities in the world, labeled "Zürich Meets Seoul".
Exciting events during the last days in September and the first days in October will showcase science, too, for which the UZH Blockchain Center BCC had been invited, especially from the UZH BCC and the Department of Informatics IfI Gerhard Schwabe (Information Management Research Group IMRSG) and Burkhard Stiller (Communication Systems Group CSG) participated in a panel and hold separate research talks.
While the panel on September 30, 2019 on "Use Cases: From Academia to Industry and Back" did see statements from Gerd and Burkhard, the discussion revealed with Carl Spörri (COO, modum.io) and Sooyong Park (Sogang University, Korea) that basic ideas and research of the Blockchain ecosystem stimulated initially many Blockchain-related prototypes. modim.io is a very good example for that situation, where the CSG developed the first initial and operational prototype for the medical drug monitoring solution.
The EU-funded competence network Concordia addresses cybersecurity aspects with leading research, technology, industrial and public competences. And as being valid for any network, the interactions between researchers is key.
Thus, Prof. Dr. Radu State, University of Luxembourg, SnT (Interdisciplinarity Center for Security, Reliability, and Trust) had been invited to the Department of Informatics IfI for the official IfI Research Colloquium.
Radu presented a talk on "Security Insights into Smart Contracts" and explained the taxonomy of newly determined security threats with respect to the application of honeypots in Blockchains and their integral Smart Contracts. A detailed study on differences in these honeypots' operations revealed clearly that errors in coding as well as obvious misuse by traps and baits exist.
In addition, the Communication Systems Group CSG organized for bilateral discussions of local Junior Researchers and Radu, which had been organized on September 26 and 27, 2019. Among other topics, eVoting an Blockchain-based solutions as well as their security threats (documented within a paper on "The Swiss Postal Voting Process and its System and Security Analysis" by Christian Killer and Burkhard Stiller) had been considered to be of high and social importance for Europe.
Finally, Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller, Lead of Concordia's Task T.43, and Radu discussed the economic dimensions of honeypots in Blockchains as well as ICOs (International Coin Offerings), which determine a measurable cybersecurity threat.
The demonstration on "Cooperative Signaling of DDoS Attacks in a Blockchain-based Network" by Bruno Rodrigues from the Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zurich UZH had been presented during the ACM SIGCOMM 2019 Demo Session. This work had been supported partly by UZH and partly by the Concordia EU project. Additionally, Muriel Franco did receive an ACM SIGCOMM student travel grant, which enabled him the joint travel with Bruno, supporting with the demo's hardware transport and preparations.
While about 1,200 attendees overall had been accounted for this year's SIGCOMM 2019, many companies, well besides the main sponsors, did show their interests in SIGCOMM topics. Thus, the interest in security, especially DDoS mitigation work, was very considerable. Already during the demo's setup already many people were surrounding the site and asking questions on which type of hardware, switches, and other hardware-related aspects.
Christian Killer from CSG@IfI, UZH, was invited to present current work on eVoting at this year's international IT security conference "Swiss Cyber Storm", October 15, 2019, Bern, Switzerland. Together with Melchior Limacher from the Limacher Informationssicherheit GmbH, Christian talked about the"Digital Exposure of Traditional Swiss Voting Channels". Especially, this talk featured a description of the current Swiss postal voting process and its security analysis and was based on the full paper previously presented at the E-VOTE ID in Bregenz, Austria.
This year's Swiss Cyber Storm had more than 300 attendees, combining practitioners and security researchers interested in various security topics from a technical and managerial perspective. The interest in the Swiss Postal Voting Security was considerably large, since no prior work analyzed and described so far potential threat events on postal voting systems, and not even on the Swiss postal voting scheme.
Thus, the key threat events were described in detail. They revealed many interesting facts of a highly distributed, human-centric, but partially technology-supported, and plausibility check-driven voting in a decentralized, IT-support, and personnel-driven voting approach.
After the talk, many personal interactions with representatives of the Swiss Bundeskanzlei, the Swiss Post, Geneva chVote, and selected companies discussed various facets of "Digital Exposure of Traditional Swiss Voting Channels".
The CSG was present at the 1st IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC 2019), May 14-17, 2019, Seoul, South Korea, IEEE) with one full paper, two posters, three demos, and one tutorial presentation as well as one panel participation.
Highly successful during the first IEEE ComSoc supported event on blockchains and cryptocurrencies the full paper on "A Blockchain-based Scientific Publishing Platform" by Sina Rafati, Lucas Pelloni, Severin Wullschleger, Andreas Schaufelbühl, Thomas Bocek, Lawrence Rajendran, and Burkhard Stiller was presented by T. Bocek. Before that the tutorial on "Blockchain and Smart Contracts – From Theory to Practice" by Bruno Rodrigues, Eder John Scheid, Roman Blum, Thomas Bocek, and Burkhard Stiller had gained attention due to B. Rodrigues' interactive presentation.
This blockchain-related work of CSG was complemented by the three demonstrators on "A Platform-independent, Generic-purpose, and Blockchain-based Supply Chain Tracking" by Sina Rafati Niya, Danijel Dordevic, Atif Ghulam Nabi, Tanbir Mann, and Burkhard Stiller, on "EUREKA – A Minimal Operational Prototype of a Blockchain-based Rating and Publishing System" by Andreas Schaufelbühl, Sina Rafati, Lucas Pelloni, Severin Wullschleger, Thomas Bocek, Lawrence Rajendran, and Burkhard Stiller, and on "Adaptation of Proof-of-Stake-based Blockchains for IoT Data Streams" by Sina Rafati, Eryk Schiller, Ile Cepilov, Fabio Maddaloni, Kürsat Aydinli, Timo Surbeck, Thomas Bocek, and Burkhard Stiller. All demos had gained valuable attention and lead to many detailed discussions with many visitors.
The two poster presentations on "CaIV: Cast-as-Intended Verifiability in Blockchain-based Voting" by Raphael Matile, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder Scheid, and Burkhard Stiller as well as on "Security Management and Visualization in a Blockchain-based Collaborative Defense" by Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, and Burkhard Stiller had been discussed interactively, too, with many participants during the coffee breaks.
Finally, the "Panel 1 - Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrencies: Opportunities and Challenges" was organized by the moderator Salil Kanhere, and Burkhard Stiller - one out of four panelists - argued that the waves of centralization and decentralization will never stop such that BC-like approaches will appear and die, as a matter of taste. While the future role of public blockchains is advantageous, especially wrt electronically derived data (no media break), the future for private blockchains may differ according to different trust assumptions, thus, possibly "surviving" as distributed systems and transaction systems. However, for any of the two, the societal and social impacts are not to be underestimated, since many application areas are by now key drivers for the first data collection in a decentralized, thus, more difficult to be censored manner ever, and in turn almost impossible to be changed or manipulated due to external (incorrect) activities.
And as a very nice conclusion of the CSG's success at ICBC 2019, Sina Rafati received during the closing session an IEEE Student Travel Grant besides five other students. Congratulations!
The CSG was very successful during this year's IFIP/IEEE IM 2019 (International Symposium on Integrated Network Management). The full papers on "Enabling Dynamic SLA Compensation Using Blockchain-based Smart Contracts" by E. Scheid, B, Rodrigues, L. Zambenedetti Granville, and B. Stiller and on "A Reputation and Reward Scheme for a Cooperative Network Defense" by A. Gruhler, B. Rodrigues, and B. Stiller have been complemented by the short paper (Poster) on "Toward a Policy-Based Blockchain Agnostic Framework" by E. Scheid, B. Rodrigues, and B. Stiller and the Experience Session paper on "Evaluating a Blockchain-based Cooperative Defense" by B. Rodrigues, L. Eisenring, E. Scheid, Th. Bocek, and B. Stiller.
Additionally, the Wednesday keynote #3 on "Blockchain Fundamentals - An Assessment of Their Broad Feasibility" was given by B. Stiller. And while the team of B. Rodrigues, E. Scheid, and B. Stiller presented the tutorial TS5 on Friday "Information Management in the Blockchain Era – Challenges and Opportunities", B. Stiller's statement on the Distinguished Expert Panel (DEP) just before Thursday's closing of IM 2019 addressed the "Intelligent Management for the Future Wave of Enterprises" topic.
Finally, B. Rodrigues as well as E. Scheid received during the closing session of IFIP/IEEE IM 2019 one IEEE Student Travel Grant each besides seven other students. Congratulations!
Dr. Michael Seufert, University of Würzburg, Germany was a project partner in the SmartenIT project, coordinated by the CSG. Additionally, based on this work performed, Michael wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Quality of Experience and Access Network Traffic Management of HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming", which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Puoc Tran-Gia and reviewed from the second supervisor Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller.
This thesis was awarded on March 20, 2019 within NetSys 2019, the biannual conference organized by the German Computer Society's (GI) Special Interest Group KuVS (Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme), the KuVS Dissertation Award 2018. Congratulations!
On Sunday March 10, 2019 at 4pm local time in Lawrence, KS, U.S.A. at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church the memorial service was held for James P. G. Sterbenz, member of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty of the University of Kansas KU since 2005.
We will miss you, but never forget. Yours, Burkhard and the CSG
CONCORDIA - Cyber Security Competence for Research and Innovation - is a major H2020 consortium to interconnect Europe’s Cybersecurity capabilities. It will establish a pilot for a Cybersecurity Competence Network to provide technological, societal and policy leadership for Europe and will lead the development of a common Cybersecurity Research & Innovation Roadmap for Europe. The EU-wide consortium involves prominent industry, academia, SMEs and especially national cyber security centers.
While the Swiss Post started an open approach to allow registered users to evaluate and perform a resilience test (Public Intrusion Test, PIT)on the Swiss Post's eVoting system - possibly applied in Swiss voting cases in the future - from arbitrary people, computer scientists, and experts, the public debate on eVoting in general has reached a new climax. Thus, an exchange of certain observations, especially with respect to eVoting, the Swiss Post's system, and general software engineering and testing aspects with the NZZ data journalist Marie-José Kolly covered CSG's views on such an approach and the current perception of the available information. The respective NZZ article is available on-line since yesterday at 18.16 hours and was also featured on Twitter.
At the 14th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2018) the tutorial on "Blockchain and Smart Contracts – From Theory to Practice", prepared by Bruno Rodrigues, Roman Blum, Thomas Bocek, and Burkhard Stiller, was presented on November 9, 2018 by Bruno Rodrigues (CSG@IfI, University of Zürich) and Roman Blum (HSR Rapperswil) in person in Rome.
This interactive tutorial provided at first a basic theoretical introduction into blockchains and Smart Contracts and secondly a practical interaction with a blockchain and initial aspects for the development of Smart Contracts.
Burkhard Stiller was invited to present a keynote at "The 3rd Symposium on Distributed Ledger Technology (SDLT 2019)" at the Gold Coast, Australia on November 12, 2018, organized by Griffith University in the Novotel (the rightmost high-rise building on the picture). SDLT 2019 was rated as one of the top cryptocurrency events to be looked out for in November 2018.
The title chosen, "Blockchains and Their Applications – A Critical Review", indicated that blockchains and many of their applications obviously exist, but especially the use of the only real blockchain in the world, the public blockchain, needs a careful review with respect to a multitude of dimensions, ranging from sustainability, via scalability, to security and performance aspects.
Determined by the Luxembourg Government and the Secretary of Higher Education, Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller was appointed member of the Scientific Counsel of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).
As of today all keynote presentations of IFIP Networking 2018 are now on-line and accessible here at the program's Web page.
The final papers of IFIP Networking 2018 are currently being prepared to be submitted to the IFIP Digital Library and IEEE Xplore.
The IFIP TC6 Meeting in Zürich run on May 17, 2018 concluded successfully with a larger number of IFIP national representatives being on board, complemented by the majority of IFIP TC6 Working Group (WG) chairs, vice-chairs, or secretaries.
Day 3 of the IFIP Networking 2018 Conference in Zürich did see the third keynote by Dr. Jürgen Quitteck on "Artificial Intelligence in Network Operations and Management". Jürgen started by over-viewing the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and applying it afterwards onto the networking domain. These two examples included a 5G-based slicing wireless telecommunication systems' provider network as well as the user profiling options based on formally consented on data collections.
Day 2 of the IFIP Networking 2018 Conference in Zürich has started with the second keynote by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kellerer on "Flexibility Matters: On the Design and Evaluation of Softwarized Networks". He introduced the basics to understand the term flexibility and what it means by adding measures to be able to compare systems. By providing examples evaluations have been shown that costs can reflect an important facet of such comparisons, why typically trade time and functionality.
Day 1 of the IFIP Networking 2018 Conference in Zürich had been concluded successfully - and more than 85 people already picked up their registration badges and bags.
Embedded within the welcome words from the General Chair and the TPC Co-chairs, represented by Prof. Dr. Claudio Casetti, the Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics, and Informatics (WWF) of the University of Zürich, Prof. Dr. Harald Gall, addressed his welcome words to the audience, which embedded University of Zürich's positioning in education Zürich as well as the Faculty's role in combining economic principles with computer science at the Department of Informatics.
The Communication Systems Group (CSG) does organize the IFIP Networking 2018 Conference in Zürich. This event is the 17th of the conference series, sponsored by the IFIP Technical Committee on Communication Systems (TC6). Besides the General Chair Burkhard Stiller responsible for the overall event, the 3 TPC Co-chairs Claudio Casetti, Fernando Kuipers, and James P. G. Sterbenz handled the full paper submission, review, and decision process as well as the set-up of the related program.
The Communication Systems Group (CSG) did demonstrate in an easy-to-understand setup the establishment of a network blocking scenario (DNS-based) as well as its bypassing from the users' perspective (VPN-based). This was embedded into a 10vor10 report, the prime Swiss evening news, on Friday May 4, 2018.
The "Setting up Flexible and Light Weight Trading Contracts with Enhanced User Privacy Using Smart Contracts" demonstration by Sina Rafati, Florian Schüpfer, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller of the Communication Systems Group CSG at the 16th IFIP/IEEE Networks Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2018), April 23-27, 2018, Taipei, Taiwan was awarded the Best Demo Award!
Smart Contracts (SC) extend the applicability of Blockchains (BC) in various decentralized use cases. This work demonstrates the design and implementation of a trading application which, employs SC and Ethereum BC. This Decentralized Application (Dapp) provides flexibility in requesting user Identity (ID) directly by seller/hirer and buyers/renter. To provide trust, deposits are paid by two sides while setting up contracts. WiFi-Direct is the chosen Device to Device (D2D) communication protocol which provides high data rates and secure data transmission.
Light-Weight SC are introduced in this work which, use D2D communications for sending sold or rented object’s or each party’s images, and ID data directly to other party instead of storing them in the public BC to reduce the costs. Evaluations in terms of D2D deployment, transaction costs, and privacy, indicate that this system is time-efficient and manages the process in a cost-efficient fashion without the need to store and publish all of the user’s ID information in BC.
The current research output of the CSG at IFIP/IEEE NOMS 2018, Taipeh, Taiwan, includes a full paper on "Big Torrent Measurement: A Country-, Network-, and Content-Centric Analysis of Video Sharing in BitTorrent" (Andri Lareida, Burkhard Stiller), a demo paper on "Setting up Flexible and Light Weight Trading Contracts with Enhanced User Privacy Using Smart Contracts" (Sina Rafati, Florian Schüpfer, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller), and the NOMS 2018 Keynote "Blockchains' Impact on Networking and Distributed Systems" by Burkhard Stiller - all to be presented on April 24, 2018.
Dr. Lisa Krisitiana, former Ph.D. student of Communication System Group CSG, with the paper of "Application of an Enhanced V2VUNET in a Complex Three-dimensional Inter-vehicular Communication Scenario" awarded as the best paper at the APWiMoB 2017 conference.
Wie sicher ist die Bezahlung mit Bitcoins wirklich?
Eine Antwort gibt Burkhard Stiller, Leiter der Communication Systems Group, im Fragendomino (UZH Journal 6/2017, S. 14).
This talk within the UZH ZI series on "Digital Transformation" by Burkhard Stiller presented (talk in German based on English slides) why Blockchains provide a modern technology for a distributed ledger, for which participating stakeholders do not need to show a pre-established trust relation. Thus, everyone can participate in case of public blockchains being used. This fact is exploited within the most prominent application of blockchains, the Bitcoin approach, a real crypto-currency.
The "Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS): Enabling a Cooperative and Multi-domain DDoS Defense" demonstration by Bruno Rodrigues, Thomas Bocek, and Burkhard Stiller of the Communication Systems Group CSG at the 42nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2017), October 9-12, 2017, Singapore was awarded the Best Demo Award!
Dr. Thomas Bocek, a current PostDoc at the Communication Systems Group CSG, received and accepted from February 1, 2018 onward the offer for a Professor's position at the Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil, Switzerland with the "Institut für Software". Congratulations!
The Swiss e-government startup Procivis and the Communication Systems Group CSG at the Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zurich UZH have announced their collaboration to develop an electronic voting solution.
The platform planned for covers the entire voting process in an electronic form and in a seamless manner, including all stakeholders and steps, from the provision of voter information to the evaluation of results. After a successful development, the blockchain-based solution is planned to be made available publicly as open source software.
Further details are accessible in Procivis' press release.
modum.io - an innovative, Zürich Technopark-based, UZH start-up, pioneering the use of blockchain and IoT technology in the pharmaceutical supply chain - began its operations in April 2016 with the formation of a strategic partnership with the Communication Systems Group CSG, lead by Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller, CSG Lab Director and now one of modum.io's Senior Advisors, with the Department of Informatics IfI at the University of Zurich UZH. Two UZH informatics students started student theses on "Securing Goods Distribution with Smart Contracts and Sensors", guided by Dr. Thomas Bocek, CSG's Senior Researcher and now member of modum.io's Board of Directors. Further student and CSG work has addressed in the meantime security, usability, stability, and an improvement of the overall architecture, including the mobile devices' app.
The IFIP TC 6 WG6.6-sponsored 11th International Conference on
Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2017) will be held in Zürich, Switzerland July 10-13, 2017, at the Department of Informatics IfI of the University of Zürich. The local organizer is the Communication Systems Group.
Prof. Dr. David Hausheer, a former PostDoc at the CSG, received and accepted after his non-tenured Assistant Professor's position at TU Darmstadt, Germany, from May 1, 2017 onward the offer of a Full Professor position at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany with the Faculty of Computer Science. Congratulations!
Dr. Radhika Garg, a former Ph.D. student at the CSG, received and accepted an offer of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A.for a three year, tenure-track Assistant Professor position. Congratulations!
The Satellite Event "START x Nexussquared @ UZH on blockchains (PDF, 3207 KB)" took place on April, 19, 2017, 16.00-20.00 hours at UZH, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zürich in KOL-G-217. The University of Zurich UZH has paired up with Nexussquared and START to organize an evening with speeches, pitches, and workshops to discuss new and innovative blockchain business ideas!
The article "Reliable Vehicular-to-Vehicular Connectivity" was accepted at ERCIM News: Special theme Autonomous Vehicles.
A CSG/UZH, modum.io, and foodways.ch team participated in the blockchain/IoT hackathon at Thomson Reuters in Baar.
The paper "Evaluation of Inter-vehicle Connectivity in Three-dimensional Cases" was accepted as short paper at the conference Wireless Days 2017 in Porto, Portugal.
Prof. Dr. Florent Thouvenin, Rechtswissenschaftliches Institut der Universität Zürich und Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller, Institut für Information der Universität Zürich stated in an expert opinion and public report (in German) that the effectiveness of Internet Blocking is questionable, though, technically partially possible, and that the Swiss legal system may suffer damage. Thus, this report is available on-line since October 10, 2016.
Since several years UZH is active in standardization under the IETF. Current activity concentrates on TinyIPFIX for smart meters in constraint networks. An updated version of the draft draft-schmitt-ipfix-tiny-01 was now published.
The technology-wise CSG-driven start-up modum.io successfully pitched its progress on cutting costs in the pharmaceutical supply chain with blockchains and IoT-based temperature sensors.
After winning stage I, modum.io also won stage II on November 23, 2016 and received 20k CHF funding from Venture Kick.
At the 41stIEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2016) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the probr team had been awarded the Best Demo Award for the demonstration entitled "Probr Demonstration - Visualizing Passive WiFi Data", prepared by a CSG's master project team. This award is based on audience voting, not performed by a jury, and has seen in a very close runner-up with three almost equally counted for votes for a total of 14 demonstrations a final win.
modum.io and CSG-driven start-up won within the Kickstart Accelrator 2016 on the final demo day of November 4, 2016 the first price in the "Future Emerging Technologies (FET)" vertical, and was the best out of originally submitted 850+ applications earlier in 2016 for an overall of four verticals on food, FinTec, and FET.
The paper "Pull Support for IoT Applications Using Mobile Access Framework WebMaDa" was accepted at the 3rd IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT). It will be presented in December 2016.
The UZH startup Modum.io pitched its IoT (Internet-of-Things) blockchain idea successfully at the Venture Kick and Kickstart Accelerator today in Lausanne. Modum.io received 10k CHF funding from Venture Kick for its pitch and starts the 3-month Kickstart Accelerator end of August at EWZ Selnau.
The paper "Third-party-independent Data Visualization of Sensor Data in CoMaDa" was accepted at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob). It will be presented in October 2016.
The AIMS 2016 paper on "Cloud Flat Rates Enabled via Fair Multi-resource Consumption" by Patrick Poulle and Burkhard Stiller has received the conference's Best Paper Award.
On Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 13.00 hours in BIN 2.A.10, as part of the Overlay Networks lecture, you are invited to attend a guest speaker on "Digital Forensics", Steffen Görlich, Kantonspolizei Zürich
The UZH startup https://modum.iopitched its blockchain idea at the ETH Entrepreneur Cluband was awarded with the 2nd placeout of 50 participants on Monday, May 9, 2016.
The pros and cons of Closed Circuit TV surveillance are always under debate, although the technology itself is neither bad nor good.
The Communication Systems Group CSG of the Department of Informatics IfI exhibits the Android app Coinblesk at CeBIT 2016 (Hall 6 at Booth B30-307 labelled "University of Zurich"), which is the first of its kind to exchange instantaneously in a mobile fashion between smartphones Bitcoins applying two-way Near Field Communications (NFC), Bluetooth LE, or Bluetooth.
FLAMINGO partner CSG@IfI at the University of Zurich (UZH) did publish a short 3.48 min teaser on "What is P2P?", which just reached a bit more than 25,000 views
Raphael Voellmy received the KuVS 2015 award for the best Bachelor Thesis for his Thesis entitled "CoinBlesk, a Mobile NFC Bitcoin Payment System".
Book chapter accceptance at Book Internet-of-Things by Elsevier.
Paper on Tussle Analysis accepted at CSCN'15 to be presented end of October
Tutorial on Two-way Authentication for Tiny Devices given at ITU.
Article about CSG's attempts to switch to a NFC-based inventory system published.
Big Data – The Areas of Conflict: Data Volume, Analysis Methods, Protection.
Recommendation Y.3013 (formerly Y.FNsocioeconomic) approved and available to the public.
CfP IJNM 2014.
Y.FNsocioeconomic Consented During ITU-T Study Group 13 Meeting.
KuVS 2014 Award Hand-over.
Bypassing Cloud Providers' Data Validation to Store Arbitrary Data
Full paper acceptance at IFIP/IEEE NOMS 2014
Paper accepted @ AIMS 2013.
One of the IFI's best 2012 Ph.D. Thesis of Dr. Fabio Hecht submitted to the GI Ph.D. Thesis competition.
The Future Internet Assembly Proceedings 2011.
9thInternational Conference on Network and Service Management
A Traceroute-Measurement Manipulation and Storage Tool (TraceMan) was released by CSG. TraceMan is a tool written in Java to store and manipulate traceroute measurements, following the RFC 5388standards. For more info, check the TraceMan Website.
The Design of a Single Funding Point Charging Architecture at the EUNICE 2012
The 6th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2012)
The 7th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technologies (ICQT 2011)
Welcome of our guest professor Karoly Farkas from BME, Busapest, Hungary. He will teach the course "557 - IP Networking Fundamentals - Theory and Practice"during the fall term 2011.
Special Issue on "Socio-economic Issues of Next Generation Networks" Guest Editors: Burkhard Stiller, UZH, Switzerland; Peter Reichl, FTW, Austria; Bruno Tuffin, INRIA, France; Trinh Anh Tuan, BME, Hungary Telecommunication Systems Journal, Vol. 47, 2011 ( http://www.springerlink.com/content/1018-4864/ ).
SESERV will run a workshop in Oxford June 28, 2011 on "Building the Future Internet: The Social Nature of Technical Choices": http://www.seserv.org/fise-conversation/seservworkshopbuildingthefutureinternetthesocialnatureoftechnicalchoices
AIMS 2011 will be run June 14-17, 2011 at INRIA, Nancy: http://www.aims-conference.org/2011/AIMS2011/Welcome.html .
The CSG has migrated its website to comply with the new corporate design of the University of Zurich.
