Research Group Critical and Extreme Security and Dependability (CritiX)

Why Choose CritiX?

CritiX pursues state-of-the-art research in a problem area that may be described as extreme computing – computer science and engineering pushed to the extremes of functional and non-functional properties of systems.

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In particular, we investigate architectures, middleware, algorithms and protocols that may find applicability in distributed systems and networks, such as those that:

  • Deploy extremely large-scale data sets, flows and computations, e.g. cloud, big data, complex event processing.
  • Withstand extreme levels of threat, like advanced persistent threats, e.g. critical information infrastructures.
  • Need to have extremely low failure probability, e.g. high-criticality areas such as finance, energy, networking (SDN), or aerospace and autonomous vehicles.
  • Present extreme requirements with regard to data privacy and integrity, e.g. e-health, genomics, or business/finance.

Resilient Modular and Distributed Computing

Resilient Modular and Distributed Computing is our response to the need for a comprehensive approach to extreme challenges. These span from architecting and designing to cope with accidental and malicious faults simultaneously, to providing protection in incremental ways, as well as to automatically adapting to a dynamic range of scale, severity, and persistence of threats, some of which unknown.

Paradigms and techniques emerging from this type of research should endow systems with the capacity of defeating extreme adversarial power, whether accidental or malicious (i.e. severe and continued threats) and sustaining perpetual and unattended operation in systematic and automatic ways.

We address this level of threat drawing from and building on recent research on powerful and innovative automatic security and dependability techniques, like fault and intrusion tolerance or byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), trusted computing and architectural hybridisation, secret sharing and secure multi-party computation, self-healing and diversity, or post-compromise security. Furthermore, we leverage enhanced formal verification techniques such as interactive theorem proving to achieve ultra-high reliance on software used behind roots-of-trust or TCBs.

We Are Hiring

Doctoral Candidates
We are recruiting bright students wishing to work towards a PhD. Take part in the construction of a new and promising research lab and a fascinating research agenda!

We are currently searching for one doctoral candidate wishing to pursue their PhD in resilient real-time and embedded systems, focusing on one or more of the following topics:

  • Resilient real-time and embedded systems and controllers,
  • Interplay between resilience mechanisms and real-time scheduling,
  • Fault and intrusion tolerant real-time operating systems.

  • Formal methods for dependable systems.

Research Associates
We are currently searching for one research associate interested to address the specific challenges related to resilient real-time and embedded systems, including fault and intrusion tolerant control.

In addition, we are also searching for candidates interested in addressing:

  • New challenges in HW-assisted and adaptive byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) (blockchain, CPS/IoT appl.);
  • New challenges in applied cybersecurity and resilience (national critical Infrastructures protection).

How to Apply
Email informal pre-application enquiries to:

Prof. Marcus Völp
Email: critix-jobs@uni.lu
Subject: CRITIX – APPLICATIONS (feel free to include your CV).

For applications follow the link.