COINS supported Mazaher Kianpour with the internship at the partner’s institution, KTH  in Stockholm, Sweden.

Ali Khodabakhsh successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology on Friday, the 18th of June 2021, and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Security and Communication Technology.

The title of his thesis is “Automated Authentication of Audiovisual Contents: A Biometric Approach” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “Active and Proactive methods for Face Synthesis forensics”.

We are no longer strangers to the phenomenon of Deepfakes and the immense risks it poses to societies. To counter the threat, it is of utmost importance to develop technical tools which facilitate content authentication and hinder the spread of fake content in the media. In this thesis, studies have been undertaken to assess the threat surface and identify subjective vulnerabilities that require immediate attention. Accordingly, effective detection mechanisms have been proposed for the alleviation of the discovered vulnerabilities. In addition, the efficacy of the state-of-the-art detection techniques has been evaluated and solutions have been proposed for the problem of generalizability which is the largest impediment to the deployment of these solutions.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Hazim Ekenel, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul, Turkey.
• Second external opponent: Professor Siwei Lyu, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA.
• Internal member and committee administrator: Associate Professor Katrien De Moor, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.

Ali Khodabakhsh carried out his PhD work at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, Gjøvik, NTNU.

His main supervisor was Professor Christoph Busch, IIK, NTNU and co-supervisor Professor Raghavendra Ramachandra, IIK, NTNU.

Congratulations!

Georgios Kavallieratos successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology on Wednesday, the 16th of June 2021, and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Security and Communication Technology.

The title of his thesis is “Security of the Cyber Enabled Ship” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “The usage of gamification for cyber security education”.

Today’s leading ship builders and operators go beyond traditional engineering to create remotely controlled and autonomous ships – both variants of the cyber enabled ship. Unless such ships are built with cyber security in mind right from their design phase, we will soon be facing cyber security issues in the shipping industry, similar to those that we are experiencing in other industries that have adopted ICT without properly addressing cyber security issues. Taking a cyber physical system perspective, this research focuses on ensuring the safe and secure operation of the cyber enabled ship. To this end, a reference architecture for the cyber physical systems onboard has been proposed, to allow the security analysis of the cyber enabled ship. Further, relevant security threats and risks have been identified and assessed; security and safety requirements have been identified; and potential attack paths between the ship’s components have been analyzed towards defining a secure system architecture of such vessels. Additionally, the treatment of the assessed security risks has been studied, and optimal sets of security controls have been proposed. Last, a reference architecture of a testbed to validate the results of this project and to test the security posture of the cyber enabled ship’s cyber physical systems has been proposed.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Jianying Zhou, iTrust Centre for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore.
• Second external opponent: Associate Professor Cristina Alcaraz, Computer Science Department, University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain.
• Internal member and committee administrator: Associate Professor Basel Katt, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, NTNU Gjøvik.

Georgios Kavallieratos carried out his PhD work at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, Gjøvik, NTNU.

His main supervisor was Professor Sokratis Katsikas, IIK, NTNU and co-supervisors Professor Slobodan Petrović, IIK, NTNU, Associate Professor Edmund Førland Brekke, ITK, NTNU and Associate Professor Hao Wang, IDI, NTNU.

Congratulations!

Aida Mehdipour Pirbazari successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the University of Stavanger, the 31st of May 2021 and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Predictive Analytics for Maintaining Power System Stability in Smart Energy Communities”.

Aida Mehdipour Pirbazari carried out her PhD work at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Stavanger in Stavanger.

Her main supervisor was Professor Chunming Rong, University of Stavanger and co-supervisor Associate Professor Antorweep Chakravorty, University of Stavanger.

Congratulations!

Manish Shrestha

The title of his thesis is “LightSC: A light-weight security classification methodology to design and evaluate security of IoT systems” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “Privacy-preserving Machine Learning: Overview and discussion of privacy-enhancing technical approaches for privacy challenges with ML”.

The Internet of Things (IoT) emerged with purely functional purposes providing sensing, connectivity, and control features at a lower cost with little concern for security.

However, the increasing number of cyber-attacks and wider adoption of IoT systems in diverse domains have raised security and privacy challenges. Despite available mechanisms, several IoT systems still lack adequate security implementation. We observed that current security approaches are expensive, time-consuming, and are substantially dependent on security experts and thus are not feasible for low-cost consumer IoT systems. Therefore, this thesis proposes a new goal-based, light-weight methodology called LightSC for IoT systems. The LightSC is tailored for non-security-experts, who can select appropriate connectivity and security mechanisms to obtain the desired security level in their system. We also have proposed a tool to support to make the LightSC methodology, which can be integrated into a DevSecOps tool-chain. DevSecOps refers to a set of practices of integrating development, security, and operation to streamline the system development life cycle process.

The LightSC tool was evaluated by real stakeholders (mostly non-experts) by successfully applying it to nineteen different IoT systems. We believe that our work will help industries to design and develop secure IoT systems, regulatory bodies to establish and enforce security regulations, and end-users to become aware of selecting adequately secure IoT products.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Sokratis Katsikas, NTNU, Norge.
• Second external opponent: Professor Simone Fischer-Hübner, Karlstad Universitet, Sverige.
• Internal member: Professor Paal Engelstad, Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Chair of defence: Professor Cecilie Rolstad Denby, Department of Technology Systems, UiO.

Manish Shrestha carried out his PhD work at the Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo.

His main supervisor was Dr Christian Johansen, Department of Informatics, UiO and co-supervisors Professor Josef Noll, Department of Technology Systems, UiO and Dr Davide Roverso, eSmart Systems AS.

Congratulations!

The title of her thesis is “Cryptographic Tools for Cloud Security” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Fully Homomorphic Encryption and its Applications”.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Ivan Damgård, Aarhus University, Denmark.
• Second external opponent: Professor Liqun Chen, University of Surrey, United Kingdom.
• Internal member and committee administrator: Associate Professor Jiaxin Pan, Department of Mathematical Sciences, NTNU.

Yao Jiang carried out her PhD work at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Trondheim, NTNU.

Her main supervisor was Professor Kristian Gjøsteen, IMF, NTNU and co-supervisor Professor Colin Boyd, IIK, NTNU.

Congratulations!

The title of her thesis is “Analysis, classification and construction of optimal cryptographic Boolean functions”.

Irene Villa carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen.

Her main supervisor was Lilya Budaghyan.

Congratulations!

Andrea Tenti

The title of his thesis is “Sufficiently overdetermined random polynomial systems behave like semiregular ones” and the topic of her trail lecture was: “Cryptanalysis of AES”.

Andrea Tenti carried out his PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen.

His supervisors were  Igor A. Semaev and Tor Helleseth.

Congratulations!

Elahe Fazeldehkordi successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo on Tuesday, the 16th of March 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Security and Privacy Solutions in IoT and Distributed Systems Design” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Executable UML models: formal modelling and verification of functional correctness and safety properties”.

New distributed systems in computing technology are appearing on the market day by day. Consequently, new security and privacy challenges arise when designing these systems. These challenges demand a need to look for comprehensive and more precise approaches that can provide higher levels of security, privacy, and trust from the design phase in these systems.

In order to develop systems including open distributed systems, we need techniques and tools for specification, design, and code generation. For the initial ideas of such systems, it is desirable to use graphical notations, so that ideas can easily be understood. This is relevant for the early design phase. Once the ideas are agreed upon, it is then desirable to have a formal basis for the specifications of the desired system, in order to support rigorous reasoning about specifications and designs. This can be done in the late design phase.

Existing documents for security and privacy requirements and functionalities in IoT systems lack some of the security functionalities, and in particular, they do not focus on privacy issues or are presented only in textual form, without defining a framework. Structures of these documents are also complicated. Systems are often made without the help of security and privacy experts. So a comprehensive graphical representation framework is needed and should be easy to follow, even for non-experts.

Formal methods have come into wide use in the design and verification of safety, security, and privacy of systems in the industry, because they are very effective in verifying safety, security, and privacy requirements of systems, requirements for which testing is mostly ineffective. Formal verification techniques can guarantee that a design is free of specific flaws.

Provability of IoT and distributed systems depends on the language used to model the system, its semantics, and the kind of system properties to prove and the techniques used to verify them. One may take a bottom-up approach, starting with low level languages in use, or one may take a top-down approach, starting with a more abstract language with an expressiveness suitable for IoT and distributed systems. Such a language can be used to model IoT and distributed systems, and if the language is executable, it can be used for simulation and prototyping of IoT and distributed systems, and if the language is imperative with standard mechanisms such as object orientation, IoT and distributed models made in the language can easily be translated to more low level languages. The latter approach also has the advantage that one can define the language and its semantics so that it is amenable to semantical analysis and verification. Additionally, this approach makes program reasoning simple and powerful.

The active object paradigm provides a natural way of modeling distributed systems in general, and IoT systems in particular, because it covers the fundamental aspects of IoT systems such as distribution of concurrent, autonomous units communicating by message passing, where each unit can run on a device with limited processing power and limited storage.

In this thesis, we focus on two aspects of the design phase to develop methodologies to improve security, privacy, and trust levels of IoT and distributed systems. Firstly, we consider the early design phase, where the architecture of a system is being developed, focusing on the setting of IoT systems. Secondly, we consider the late design phase, where models, in particular executable models and prototypes are designed, focusing on IoT systems and also the more general setting of distributed systems. For the modeling related to the late design phase, we limit our work to the active object paradigm. In particular, we find techniques for increasing the security level of the overall IoT systems using a security and privacy functionality framework, and a technique for detecting potential vulnerabilities that can cause distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks using static analysis technique. In addition, we developed a language-based approach to provide trust, safety, security, and privacy for smart contracts.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Jüri Vain, Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Software Science, Estonia.
• Second external opponent: Svetlana Boudko, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway.
• Internal member: Professor Paal Engelstad, Department of Technology Systems, UiO.
• Chair of defence: Head of Department Stian Løvold, Department of Technology Systems, UiO

Elahe Fazeldehkordi carried out her PhD work at the Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo.

Her main supervisor was Professor Olaf Owe, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo and co-supervisors Professor Josef Noll, Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo, Postdoctoral Fellow Toktam Ramezanifarkhani, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo and Associate Professor Christian Johansen NTNU, Norway.

Congratulations!

Ashish Rauniyar successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo on Tuesday, the 2nd of March 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of his thesis is “Exploring and Enhancing Spectral and Energy Efficiency of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in Next-Generation IoT Networks” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “Analysis of 5G backbone as fibre replacement in rural areas”.

The next generation of Internet of Things (IoT) networks is expected to meet the capacity demand of billions of IoT devices. Moreover, to provide massive connectivity requirements of IoT sensors and devices and to ameliorate their capacity demands, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has been considered as a potential candidate for the 5G and future network. Another key objective of the next generation of IoT network is also to maximize the energy-efficiency. To this end, Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) has been contemplated as a viable solution to self-sustainable communication in IoT networks.

In this dissertation, different from the state-of-the-art methods and architectures, we propose and investigate several spectral and energy-efficient NOMA-SWIPT architectures for future IoT networks. We also discuss user pairing issues in NOMA. We propose an adaptive user pairing scheme that shows the capacity enhancement of NOMA systems. Since NOMA is fragile to interference, an energy-efficient distributed power control in NOMA using Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Game Theoretic approach is also proposed. Finally, this dissertation proposes and investigates different models by consolidating direct links to enhance the cooperative NOMA-SWIPT systems’ performance significantly. We believe that the study and results presented in this dissertation might be potentially useful to network operators, researchers, and scientists in the wireless networking community who want to assess NOMA characteristics to design next-generation IoT networks.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Associate Professor Chiara Buratti, Department DEI, University of Bologna, Italy.
• Second external opponent: Professor Ingrid Moerman, Ghent University, Belgium.
• Internal member: Professor Josef Noll, Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Chair of defence: Professor Stephan Oepen, Department of Informatics, UiO.

Ashish Rauniyar carried out his PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

His main supervisor was Professor Paal Engelstad, Department of Technology Systems, UiO and co-supervisor Senior Researcher Olav Norvald Østerbrø, Telenor.

Congratulations!

Cristina Viorica Heghedus successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the University of Stavanger, the 7th of February 2020 and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Dynamic Machine Learning Approaches for Data Driven Energy Informatics”.

Cristina Viorica Heghedus carried out her PhD work at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Stavanger in Stavanger.

Her main supervisor was Professor Chunming Rong, University of Stavanger and co-supervisor Associate Professor Antorweep Chakravorty, University of Stavanger.

Congratulations!

Flávia Dias Casagrande successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo on Friday, the 13th of December 2019 and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Sensor Event and Activity Prediction using Binary Sensors in Real Homes with Older Adults” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Ambient Intelligence for Sensor Network”.

A fair amount of research on smart home functions has aimed at assisting older adults in their everyday life. The implementation of these functions relies on the performance of activity recognition and prediction algorithms. The research literature contains a number of well-performing algorithms for activity recognition and prediction. However, most of this work uses data collected in controlled environments (e.g. lab environments) using scripted activities.

This thesis applied, evaluated, and compared the performance of state-of-the-art prediction algorithms in real-world scenarios. The project conducted a field trial including eight smart homes with one resident each, located in a care facility in Oslo for older adults over 65 years old. The homes have about 15 sensors, including motion, magnetic, and power sensors. Probabilistic methods and neural networks were applied to predict the next sensor event and activity of daily living in the home, as well as its time of occurrence.

The work shows that it is possible to achieve acceptable prediction accuracy with few sensors and about three weeks of collected data. Transfer learning between apartments has also shown to be well performing. In addition, the study can be useful for deciding which prediction methods to use depending on the case, and in accordance with project constraints (e.g. the number of sensors, user privacy).

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Ahmad Lotfi, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom.
• Second external opponent: Professor Svetlana Yanushkevich, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada.
• Internal member: Professor Carsten Griwodz, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Chair of defence: Lecturer Dag Langmyhr, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

Flávia Dias Casagrande carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

Her main supervisor was Associate Professor Evi Zouganeli, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway and co-supervisor Professor Jim Tørresen, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.

Congratulations!

Siri Bromander successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo on Friday, the 19th of March 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Understanding Cyber Threat Intelligence – Towards Automation” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “The JOSE security scheme”.

Cyberattacks have the realistic potential of causing serious harm to humans, their assets and business processes. Cybersecurity is aimed at detecting, blocking and mitigating such threats and cyber threat intelligence is used to inform the decisions on how to respond to the ever-changing threats in and from cyber space. Increasing the effectiveness of cyber threat intelligence strengthens the collective digital defense.

Cyber threat intelligence is collection, analysis and dissemination of relevant data, information and knowledge about cyber threats. Automation of such efforts increases the efficiency and allows use of advanced analysis techniques which requires large computational power. Such automation requires machine readable content. Standardization and structure provides a computer with the ability to read and process data, information and potentially knowledge.

This thesis gives an overview of what cyber threat intelligence is and the status of standardization efforts within the domain. A datamodel which provides automation possibilities is suggested and explained.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Geir Myrdahl Køien, University of South-East Norway (USN), Norway.
• Second external opponent: Professor Kathryn Laskey, George Mason University, USA.
• Internal member: Professor II Ketil Stølen, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway and SINTEF.
• Chair of defence: Professor Carsten Griwodz, Department of Informatics, UiO

Siri Bromander carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

Her main supervisor was Professor Audun Jøsang, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo and co-supervisors Senior Security Analyst and Head of Research Martin Eian, mnemonic, Associate Professor Christian Johansen, NTNU, Norway and Professor Katrin Franke, NTNU, Norway.

Congratulations!

Shukun Tokas successfully completed her PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the University of Oslo on Friday, the 19th of February 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of her thesis is “Analysis and Enforcement of GDPR-related Privacy Principles in Object-Oriented Distributed Systems” and the given topic for her trial lecture was “Temporal logics: Theory, tools and applications”.

Main research findings

Privacy is recognized as a fundamental human right in the European Union, giving the right to a private life and associated freedom. In the midst of digital disruption, to have a meaningful balance between the fundamental privacy rights, innovation, and economic growth, it is therefore important to consider privacy as a primary requirement in system engineering. This thesis provides fundamental computing concepts for privacy, in order to facilitate construction of privacy-compliant systems.

By making privacy as an intrinsic component in design and development of systems, contributions of this thesis provide a way to turn privacy needs into tangible controls and a way to verify if the system is privacy compliant. In particular, the thesis focus on GDPR’s specific privacy requirements: data protection by design and data subject access request. There is a growing demand for verifiable privacy compliance in order to produce evidence for regulatory requirements such as accountability, transparency, etc. And this research work is at the intersection of GDPR-related privacy requirements and formal methods to facilitate a formal specification and verification of privacy compliance.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate her thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Issa Traore, University of Victoria, Canada.
• Second external opponent: Professor Erika Ábrahám, RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
• Internal member: Researcher Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Chair of defence: Professor Carsten Griwodz, Department of Informatics, UiO

Shukun Tokas carried out her PhD work at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

Her main supervisor was Professor Olaf Owe, Department of Informatics, UiO and co-supervisors Professor Martin Steffen, Department of Informatics, UiO and Postdoctoral Fellow Toktam Ramezanifarkhani, Department of Informatics, UiO.

Congratulations!

Songpu Ai successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the University of Stavanger, the 30th of April 2019 and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The title of his thesis is “Household energy management system in energy internet”.

Songpu Ai carried out his PhD work at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Stavanger in Stavanger.

His main supervisor was Professor Chunming Rong, University of Stavanger and co-supervisor Associate Professor Antorweep Chakravorty, University of Stavanger.

Congratulations!

Adam Szekeres successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology on Tuesday, the 1st of December 2020, and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Security and Communication Technology.

The title of his thesis is “Human Motivation as the Basis of Information Security Risk Analysis” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “Cybersecurity and AI”.

The importance of human decision-making in security is highlighted by the fact that the concept of security exists for a fundamental reason: stakeholder incentives can be misaligned i.e. there may exist at least one person who would benefit from causing a loss to another entity. The previously established Conflicting Incentives Risk Analysis (CIRA) method places the strength of human motivation at the centre of the risk analysis process. As the purpose of risk analysis is to make predictions about potential future events to guide resource allocations, CIRA relies on predictions about the behavior of key stakeholders in the future. The method’s real-world applicability depends on the accuracy with which strategic stakeholder decisions can be predicted. Therefore, there is a need for the reliable and valid assessment of human motivation underlying observable behaviour. This thesis contributes to the literature of information security risk analysis by investigating the predictability of human behavior and by integrating a major motivational theory into CIRA’s existing framework. This work assumes highly restricted environments with adversarial stakeholders who may be inaccessible for traditional psychological assessment methods and non-cooperative with an analyst, which requires the use of unobtrusive methods for inferring relevant motivational profile information about stakeholders. The overall goal is to provide a better understanding about the connection between basic human motivations and the resulting risks which may pose a threat to the safety and security of societies relying on Smart Grids enabled by IoT technologies.

The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:

• First external opponent: Professor Steven Furnell, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
• Second external opponent: Professor Mariëlle Stoelinga, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
• Internal member and committee administrator: Associate Professor Basel Katt, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, NTNU Gjøvik.

Adam Szekeres carried out his PhD work at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, Gjøvik, NTNU.

His main supervisor was Professor Einar Snekkenes, IIK, NTNU and co-supervisor Associate Professor Laura Georg Schaffner, IIK, NTNU.

Congratulations!

The aim of the annual NISK conference series was to be presenting new research and developments in the field of ICT security and privacy, and bringing together people from universities, industry, and public authorities. Both national and international contributions by researchers, practitioners, and PhD- and Master thesis students presenting new problems and solutions within topics on ICT security were invited.

COINS supported several students to attend the NISK 2020 online:

1. Lise Millerjord, NTNU
2. Bálint Zoltán Téglásy, NTNU
3. Prosper Yeng, NTNU
4. Wrya Kadir, UiB
5. Muhammad Mudassar Yamin, NTNU
6. Aida Akbarzadeh, NTNU
7. Merve Bas Seyyar, NTNU
8. Livinus Obiora Nweke, NTNU
9. Kelsey Moran, NTNU

COINS supported Aida Akbarzadeh to attend the ACM CCS 2020 online.