Theses

We offer theses for many topics in the area of IT security and cryptography. The offered theses cover a wide area of topics ranging from application-related to theoretical or research-related. We are always looking for motivated students who are interested in writing a thesis in our group. Below you can find a description of some current research projects in our group. If any of the research projects piques your interest and you want to write a thesis related to the project please contact Tobias Handirk (tobias.handirk{at}uni-wuppertal.de). Furthermore, you are always welcome to propose your own ideas for a thesis topic in the area of IT security and cryptography, that is not related to our current research projects.

Ongoing Theses

Kyber: Theoretical Foundations and An Implementation Vulnerability (Sebastian Dederer, BA)
Print-and-Store Protocols for Secure Key Retrieval (Dennis Funke, MA)
Automated Implementations of Pairing-based ABE in Charm (Adrian Ackermann, MA)

Finished Theses

2024

Analyzing the Secure Value Recovery Protocol in Signal (BA, Deborah Fa)
Evaluierung der Anwendungspotenziale von Secure Multiparty Computation im Gesundheitswesen (BA, Jonas Lützenkirchen)
Prämiert mit einem Barmenia-Förderpreis 2024.
On the Integrity of Outsourced Storage (BA, Björn Lorenzen)
Prämiert mit einem Barmenia-Förderpreis 2024.
Oblivious TLS: Application and Analysis (MA, Tom Neuschulten)
Analyzing FALCON: A Post-Quantum Signature Scheme (Kevin Schumacher, BA)
Kryptanalyse homophoner Substitutionschiffren (Sebastian Baum, BA)

2023

Der Raft Consensus Algorithmus: Eine sicherheitsorientierte Analyse (BA, Marc Westenberger)

2022

Sichere Implementierung Elliptischer Kurven in eingebetteten Systemen (MA, Timo Witte)
Erweiterung des CIC-IDS2017 Trainingsdatensatzes mit Bleichenbachers Angriff (BA, Hendrik Dappen)
On the Cryptanalysis of Historical Substitution Ciphers (BA, Adrian Ackermann)
Multi-User ORAM (BA, Felix Kauka)
Pushing the AutoSCA Tool to Picosecond Precision: Improving Timing Side Channel Detection (BA, Dennis Funke)

2021

Explanation of the Briar App (BA, Pascal Jeschke)
Length-Hiding Encryption: Implementation and Analysis (BA, Tom Neuschulten)
Isogeny-based Signatures (MA, Jonas von der Heyden)
Detection of Timing Side Channels - Extending the AutoSCA Tool (BA, Anastasija Berlinblau)

2020

Formalizing Security for Session Resumption Across Hostnames (MA, Tobias Handirk)
Instanziierung von Verifiable Random Functions mit Computational Admissible Hash Functions (BA, Robin Stunic)
Efficient Point Multiplication on Elliptic Curves (BA, Robin Jaroschek)

Automated Cryptanalysis of Historical Ciphers

There are many historical ciphers that to this date remain unbroken such that existing encrypted texts are impossible to understand. Many historical ciphers are substitution ciphers, where every character of a plaintext is substituted by a corresponding character or symbol in the ciphertext. Many substitution ciphers have been broken in the past by analysing the most common symbols in the ciphertext and correlating this information to the statistical frequency of letters in the language of the plaintext. Nevertheless this simple approach was not yet successful for some historical texts. The goal of this project is to further improve this approach to be able to decrypt these ciphers. Theses related to this project can help designing and implementing a software tool that is able to automatically break these historical ciphers.

Secure Storage for Encrypted Instant Messaging

The problem of securely storing messages and media in Instant Messaging (IM) environments has tremendous practical importance. Even though there has been a lot of research on the security of IM, this has mostly focused on the security of messages during their transmission and it is unclear what kind of security guarantees we can achieve when storing these messages on a device or on a back up server. In this project we aim to close this gap and provide precise security definitions for local as well as outsourced storage. A thesis in the context of this project could e.g. examine what techniques are currently used by IM services to store messages and media locally and in back ups and what kind of security guarantees these techniques provide.