Theses

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Thesis Topics

The following topics are topics that we offer students of TU Darmstadt to work on as topics for their Bachelor or Master theses.

Open Thesis Topics

  • 2013/05/17

    Static Fault Analysis

    Master Thesis

    Background

    Software fault injection is a widely used testing approach to assess the robustness of software components or systems: The software under assessment is deliberately exposed to errors in its operational environment that violate its specification. Such tests require the definition of a fault model, i.e. what constitutes a fault for the system under test. Unfortunately, complex fault models result in prohibitively large numbers of test cases that render a comprehensive robustness assessment infeasible.

    Current approaches to deal with this complexity simply reduce the number of test cases to a manageable fraction, sadly often without providing an argument that the performed reductions preserve the conclusiveness of the analysis.

    Objectives

    Recent advances in static analyses of software product lines (SPLs) have led to significant reductions of analysis time by avoiding the repeated analysis of common code across the different variants. The goal of this thesis is to explore to which degree similar reductions apply for fault-based robustness analyses.

    For this purpose, software faults need to be modeled as software “variants“ and an existing tool chain (SPLlift) for the static analysis of software variants needs to be applied to derive robustness properties.

    Prerequisites

    Students applying for this thesis topic should be familiar with the Java programming language. Experience with static analyses or software (robustness) testing will be of help. The thesis has to be written in English. go

    Announcement as PDF

  • 2012/11/12

    Demonstrator for Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition

    Bachelor Thesis

    Supervisors: Michael Zohner, M.Sc., Dr. Thomas Schneider

    Announcement as PDF

  • 2012/10/28

    Practical Aspects of Secure Computation Protocols

    Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis

    Two-party Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) allows two mistrusting parties to securely evaluate a common function on their private inputs without involving a trusted third party. SFE enables a variety of privacypreserving applications such as medical diagnostics, face recognition, or checking no-flight lists. Since its invention 25 years ago, SFE has undergone many algorithmic improvements and has become practical on today’s hardware. In our group we aim to develop several tools for investigation of SFE in practice and making it as usable as basic cryptographic primitives such as encryption or signatures. In this context we offer several challenging topics for master and diploma theses. We strongly encourage and provide support to highly motivated students to publish the results of their thesis on established international conferences.

    Possible topics include but are not limited to:

    • Platform for comparison of cryptographic protocols

    • Universal Circuits (requires knowledge in graph theory)

    • SFE on Multiprocessor Systems

    • SFE in the Cloud / Distributed Systems

    • SFE on Graphics Cards go

    Supervisor: Dr. Thomas Schneider

    Announcement as

Ongoing Thesis Research

  • 2013/04/05

    A visualizer and debugger for static analyses in Eclipse

    Analysis visualization in the XCode IDE
    Analysis visualization in the XCode IDE

    Master thesis on Eclipse, Static Analysis and Android

    Master Thesis

    Apple’s analysis engine XCode features a static-analysis and visualization feature that can be seen in the attached image. The visualization makes it very simple to recognize and follow, for instance, information-flow violations in ObjectiveC code.

    We are currently building an analysis infrastructure for Android apps, which involves complex information-flow analyses that are hard to understand and debug. To aid programmers of such analyses, we have started to develop visualization support in Eclipse, similar to the one in XCode. The topic of this thesis will be to finalize this support, and to design and implement a full static-analysis debugger in the Eclipse IDE.

    In a first analytical part, the student will answer, in collaboration with the thesis advisors, crucial questions regarding requirements such as: What analysis details to visualize and how? How do programmers step through a static analysis? How to best visualize static abstractions of runtime objects?

    In a second part, the student will define a client/server architecture in which the “server” is the debugged analysis and the client is the to-be-programmed plugin for the Eclipse IDE. Here one will have to answer questions such as: What information is best computed on the client, what on the server? What is the communication protocol?

    The final part will consist of the design and implementation of appropriate user-interface elements as extensions to our current Eclipse plugin. As evaluation, the Master thesis will discuss the different debugging scenarios (“user stories”) that the debugger supports.

    Ideal candidates should have good knowledge of and/or interest in Eclipse plugin design and debugging. Good Java skills are necessary. Students will instantly become part of a dynamic and diverse team working on Android analysis, will deepen their understanding of Eclipse, and will learn a lot about static analysis. Prior knowledge on static analysis is not required. go

    Author: Alexander Jandousek

    Supervisors: Steven Arzt, M.Sc., Eric Bodden, Dr.

    Announcement as PDF

  • 2012/11/28

    Precise and Scalable Information-flow Analysis

    Master Thesis

    Author: Christian Fritz

    Supervisor: Dr. Eric Bodden

  • 2012/11/05

    An AspectJ pointcut for matching invokedynamic instructions

    Master Thesis

    Author: Thorben Bürgel

    Supervisor: Dr. Eric Bodden

  • 2012/09/11

    Generating Dalvik code from intermediate representations

    Master Thesis

    Author: Thomas Pilot

    Supervisor: Dr. Eric Bodden

  • 2012/08/27

    Hardware-Assisted Secure Computation on Mobile Devices

    Master Thesis

    Author: Demmler Daniel

    Supervisors: Michael Zohner, M.Sc., Dr. Thomas Schneider

Completed Theses