Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers unconditional security according to the laws of quantum physics. A QKD system enables its users to securely set up symmetric keys for encryption by sending quantum signals, either over optical fibres or over free-space. In current commercial QKD systems, these symmetric keys are consumed in classical secure communications protocols like … full description “A commercial alternative to QKD: filling USB sticks and hard disks with random bits (completed)”
Project List
A simulation model of self-powered ankle prosthetics (completed)
Unlike conventional passive prosthetics, self-powered prosthetics provide positive net work to enhance strength and speed of limb movement. These are used not just in rehabilitation medicine but also as components of powered exoskeletons, a technology with numerous applications including military, manufacturing and construction industry, emergency and rescue. The extent of powered propulsion is typically determined … full description “A simulation model of self-powered ankle prosthetics (completed)”
Agent Development Library (completed)
The aim of this project is to extend an existing agent library implemented in Java. The project should allow the deployment of one or more software agents that are capable of performing actions in an electronic simulated environment that has its own physics. The objectives of the project are to: (a) implement a concrete environment … full description “Agent Development Library (completed)”
Agent Worlds Visualiser for a Mobile Phone (completed)
The aim of this project is to build a visualiser of an agent application that runs on a server. The project should allow the translation of an agent environment and the entities it may contain to a user friendly graphical representation that the user can interact with. The visualiser should be able to display the … full description “Agent Worlds Visualiser for a Mobile Phone (completed)”
Algorithmic Game Theory and Computational Social Choice (completed)
This project will be co-supervised with Eduard Eiben. We will study a topic arising from Algorithmic Game Theory and/or Computational Social Choice. The specific topic/area will be defined during an inital meeting with Eduard and myself. Some examples of such topics are (this list is by no means exhaustive):– Computation of Nash Equilibria;– Fair Division … full description “Algorithmic Game Theory and Computational Social Choice (completed)”
Algorithms for Temporal Graphs (completed)
The project will be co-supervised with Argyris Deligkas. The focus of the project is to study and optimize real-life networks that change over time. Some prominent examples of such networks include logistics schedules, public transportation systems, electricity-demand over power grids, information flows, and virus spreading. We plan to study this type of problems through the … full description “Algorithms for Temporal Graphs (completed)”
An Automated Negotiating Agent using GENIUS (completed)
We negotiate every day in our life for a number of activities ranging from deciding the wake-up time in the morning, the number of hours to spend on our coursework, a destination for our next holiday to the number of bucks to be spent on our desirable gadgets. How great it would be if there … full description “An Automated Negotiating Agent using GENIUS (completed)”
Attacking Large Pre-trained Programming Language Models (PLMs) via Backdoors (completed)
Project Description: Backdoors refer to a class of Machine Learning (ML) attacks where an adversary trains an ML model to intentionally misclassify any input to a specific label [1]. This is typically achieved by poisoning the training data, such that inputs are misclassified to a target label when the backdoor trigger is present. For instance, … full description “Attacking Large Pre-trained Programming Language Models (PLMs) via Backdoors (completed)”
Automatic Patch-based Exploit Generation (completed)
When a vulnerability is found, it generally goes through a responsible disclosure process. This means that the vendor will be contacted to write a fix before the vulnerability is made public. The patch will be pushed to its users and the vulnerability details become public. In theory, this is a safe process for vulnerability exposure … full description “Automatic Patch-based Exploit Generation (completed)”
Blockchain to provide Data Provenance Integrity and Privacy (completed)
Blockchain, also part of the cryptocurrencies, can be viewed as a potentially shared/semi-shared/private, the immutable ledger for recording sequence of events or history of transactions. The blockchain technology can be deployed to provide a high-degree of trust, accountability, and transparency associated with a set of transactions/events – especially log files and data provenance. Data provenance … full description “Blockchain to provide Data Provenance Integrity and Privacy (completed)”
Building a dataset of IoT device firmwares (completed)
Performing security analysis of IoT devices is often expensive as it requires purchasing the IoT device, which is not practical at scale. To avoid this some researchers perform security analysis over the apps used by those IoT devices. Although this analysis can be useful it has some limitations as only one element of the ecosystem … full description “Building a dataset of IoT device firmwares (completed)”
Building a Full Causality Chain Across an Enterprise System (completed)
Data Provenance refers to records of the inputs, entities, systems and process that influence data of interest, providing a historical record of the data and its origins. To provide a holistic view of the data provenance in an enterprise system, the provenance records of the activities carried out on a client workstation is important. Last … full description “Building a Full Causality Chain Across an Enterprise System (completed)”
Building Data Provenance from Database Log Files (completed)
Databases are an integral part of any organisations operations. They act as storage repositories for a large set of data that the respective organisation relies upon for their efficient operations. One of the commonly deployed and open source database application is MySQL. It collects and stores a large set of log files related to the … full description “Building Data Provenance from Database Log Files (completed)”
Control-flow Bending POCs (completed)
Research has shifted over the years when it comes to binary exploitation. With more accurate and practical implementations of Control-flow Integrity (CFI) [1] [2] [3], the question arises as to what attack surface is still available – and how to exploit it. In particular, what attacks can be performed when staying within the boundaries of … full description “Control-flow Bending POCs (completed)”
Control-flow graphs for Automatic-Exploit Generation (completed)
Research has shifted over the years when it comes to binary exploitation. With more accurate and practical implementations of Control-flow Integrity (CFI) [1][2], the question arises as to what attack surface is still available – and how to exploit it. In particular, what attacks can be performed when staying within the boundaries of a (perfect) … full description “Control-flow graphs for Automatic-Exploit Generation (completed)”
Correct and Certified Regular Expressions (completed)
In programming language research ideas are explored in an ofte repeated loop. You have an idea then propose the language feature to study, its semantics, and the prove it has the properties you expect (type safety, performance, expressivity, etc.). In this project, we want to explore such a cycle working with regular expressions as the … full description “Correct and Certified Regular Expressions (completed)”
Data Provenance for Multi-Database Servers Enterprise Architecture (completed)
Enterprise architecture, with increasing frequencies, is based on multiple databases that split the enterprise data among itself and store them on separate database servers. Such a scheme enables an effective load balancing and management of enterprise data. However, my splitting data over multiple databases make it challenging to build a unified data provenance view of … full description “Data Provenance for Multi-Database Servers Enterprise Architecture (completed)”
Decentralised Autonomous Economy of Things – Putting rational actors back into Economy (completed)
Project Description Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed ledger technologies are part of the movement to develop the device-specific decentralised economy. Example of such a service is decentralised energy grids that couple together the smart contracts and smart-meter technology to provide traceability and verification of energy sources, efficient peer-to-peer trading of energy. One such proposal … full description “Decentralised Autonomous Economy of Things – Putting rational actors back into Economy (completed)”
Decentralised Cloud – Building an All-Purpose Execution Platform on Blockchain (completed)
Project Description Blockchain and distributed ledger technology have invigorated the decentralised architectures. The positives of a decentralised architecture are that it is distributed widely and challenging to launch a DDoS against such a network. Besides that, the immutability and strong traceability/trackability of blockchain technologies can be considered as a foundation for designing a secure, reliable, … full description “Decentralised Cloud – Building an All-Purpose Execution Platform on Blockchain (completed)”
Detecting broken security in hybrid Android apps (completed)
Many modern Android applications make use of a webview – a component providing easy access to the rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter of a full browser. The content shown by a webview can be loaded from a local resource or a remote server via HTTP and integrates seamlessly with the app. Webviews are popular with developers, … full description “Detecting broken security in hybrid Android apps (completed)”
Disassembling x86 binaries for static analysis and reverse engineering (completed)
The Jakstab static analyser for binaries automatically disassembles x86 binaries for Windows or Linux and reconstructs a control flow graph. It is particularly effective on targets that have been obfuscated with various tricks that throw off regular disassemblers such as IDA Pro. Jakstab disassembles one instruction at a time, translates it into an intermediate language, and then … full description “Disassembling x86 binaries for static analysis and reverse engineering (completed)”
Eclipse plugin for the ART parser generator (completed)
The ART parser generator is one of a new breed of compiler generation tools which provides efficient generalised parsing. This means that language designers have complete freedom to specify syntax in a way that supports downstream processes rather than having to shoehorn their ideas into the constraints imposed by current near-deterministic parser generators like Bison … full description “Eclipse plugin for the ART parser generator (completed)”
Entry into the PACE Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge (completed)
Parameterized Complexity is a research field that, by its own self-description, strives to provide practical, yet theoretically well-founded ways to deal with computationally hard problems (e.g., so-called NP-hard problems). However, the vast majority of the work in the field is purely theoretical — there is a great toolbox of interesting and powerful algorithmic methods, which have been proven to have … full description “Entry into the PACE Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge (completed)”
Formal semantics and C (completed)
When we want to know how a programming language construct such as Java exception handling works, we look it up in the language manual or a textbook. This is good enough for most programmers since they can test their understanding by compiling short programs and watching their effects in a debugger. However, compiler developers have … full description “Formal semantics and C (completed)”
Improving Automatic Bug Detection in JavaScript (completed)
Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) is an effective tool for bug detection in real software. Like unit testing and fuzzing DSE executes portions of a program, exposing bugs through runtime program exceptions. In DSE, some inputs to the program under test are made “symbolic” while the rest are fixed. Whenever the symbolic execution encounters a conditional operation … full description “Improving Automatic Bug Detection in JavaScript (completed)”
Increasing the Efficiency of Low-land Natural Disaster Search and Rescue through ‘Supervised Hybrid Animal-UAV Interactions’ (completed)
Search and Rescue (SAR) is a time-critical event: after a finite period of time the chances of recovering individuals who have become lost, or trapped in the wake of a disaster, trend towards zero. As a result, management of search and rescue resources is paramount. Travel time, planning and executing search grids, are pivotal tasks … full description “Increasing the Efficiency of Low-land Natural Disaster Search and Rescue through ‘Supervised Hybrid Animal-UAV Interactions’ (completed)”
Interactive Visualisation of Disentangled Representations (completed)
This project aims to develop an interactive visualisation toolkit based on existing technologies (IPython & Plotly) that will assist researchers in debugging and understanding complex models in the area of representation learning. Representation learning is a sub-field of machine learning that focuses on developing techniques for representing objects that exist in high-dimensional space (e.g. faces … full description “Interactive Visualisation of Disentangled Representations (completed)”
Invisible Malware using Intel SGX Enclaves (completed)
A fundamental security problem when hosting applications on cloud platforms is the increased risk of sensitive data loss (e.g. due to negligent or malicious employees of the cloud provider). An exciting approach to mitigating such attacks are new trusted execution environments (e.g. Intel SGX), recently available on commodity CPUs. Intel SGX allows users to create … full description “Invisible Malware using Intel SGX Enclaves (completed)”
Local Search Heuristics for Schelling Games on Graphs (completed)
Schelling games were recently introduced and studied as a novel class of strategic games inspired by the Schelling’s model of residential segregation. These games are played on an undirected graph that represent the topology of a residential area. In addition, we are given a set of agents partitioned into multiple types. Each agent occupies a … full description “Local Search Heuristics for Schelling Games on Graphs (completed)”
Machine Learning for Crystal Structure Prediction (completed)
Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) is one of the major problems in computational chemistry with numerous applications in real life. This is essentially the (global) minimisation of a continuous, high-dimensional, complicated function. Many heuristic methods have been proposed for CSP and recently new methods based on Machine Learning were introduced. The goal of this project is … full description “Machine Learning for Crystal Structure Prediction (completed)”