Theses (Bachelor/Master)
We offer thesis topics related to cryptography, IT security and Blockchain technologies. Our major areas of research are:
- Hardware cryptography: for example, designing new cryptographic primitives that are provably secure against side-channel attacks, analyzing existing countermeasures and benchmarking their efficiency.
- Scalability of blockchains: for example, investigating how to improve the efficiency and transaction throughput of blockchain technology.
- Security of blockchain: for example, attacking the privacy or robustness of existing cryptocurrencies.
- Cryptographic protocols: for example, designing cryptographic protocols that guarantee fairness by using smart contracts, or preserve privacy by using zero-knowledge proof systems.
We offer both more theoretical and applied thesis topics. A theoretical thesis may include a literature survey, security models and a formal security analysis of a security/cryptographic/blockchain protocols. In a more applied thesis you will implement new primitives and protocols and benchmark their performance (according to various measures). Alternatively, you may also try to attack existing cryptographic/security/blockchain systems.
If you are interested please do not hesitate to contact us via thesis@cac.cysec.de.
Supervised Master and Diploma Theses
| Title | Year |
|---|---|
| Trustless incoercible sale of physical goods over a blockchain | 2023 |
| A Thorough Study of Hashed-State Contracts: Techniques, Optimizations and Evaluation | 2022 |
| Ethereum Consensus Verification in an EGo-Enclave | 2022 |
| Fractional Stake Stability in Proof-of-Stake Cryptocurrencies | 2022 |
| Platooning mit Perun Channels | 2021 |
| Efficient Cryptographic Schemes provable secure against real Side-Channel-Attacks | 2021 |
| Random Probing Security of Shift-lnvariant Functions | 2021 |
| Layer-3 Payment channels on Plasma | 2021 |
| Related Key Attack Secure Authenticated Encryption | 2021 |
| Fair Exchange Protocol over Bitcoin | 2021 |
| Analyzing the definitions and Security of Adaptor Signatures | 2020 |
| Implementation and Comparison of ECDSA Threshold Signatures | 2020 |
| Blockchain-based Public Verifiable Constant Round Multi-Party Computation against Covert Adversaries | 2020 |
| Evaluation of interoperability solutions for blockchains | 2020 |
| Designing a Plasma TEE Payment Protocol | 2020 |
| From Random Probing to Average Random Probing: Connecting Probing Models | 2020 |
| Multiparty State Channels | 2019 |
| Interactive Smart Contract-Based Fair Exchange Protocol | 2019 |
| Free Option Problem – Avoidance through Mechanism Design based on Smart Contracts | 2019 |
| On Consensus in Phantom | 2019 |
| Atomic Cross-Chain Payments | 2019 |
| Evaluation of payment channel networks for micropayments | 2019 |
| Payment and State Channels in practice | 2018 |
| Evaluation of the Efficiency of different Architectures and Pathfinding Algorithms | 2018 |
| Opportunities and Risk of Crypto-Tokens and ICOS – A Critical Analysis | 2018 |
| TeePay – Using Trusted Execution Environments for Off-chain Payment | 2018 |
| Cryptographic Techniques for Hardware Security | 2018 |
Proposals
Some example proposals are listed below. However, these are just samples. If you are interested in doing a thesis with us, we advise to check out our research web-pages and contact us for further topics.
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General Information
Requirements
We expect that undergraduate students preparing a Bachelor thesis show a strong interest in topics related to our lectures. Bachelor theses may be written in German or English. Please choose German if you have difficulties drafting a flawless document in English.
A Master thesis should have substantial knowledge in at least one sub-field of security or cryptography, and they should have prior experience with the research methodology they plan to use. The default language for Master theses is English.
We only supervise student from TU Darmstadt. In exceptional cases we supervise Master students at a company. In this case you need to write a proposal (ca. 2 pages) highlighting why your topic is important for our research.
Recommendation
Candidates are expected to be familiar with the general instructions for writing a thesis at the Department of Computer Science.
Please consider the following options to find a topic of the thesis:
- Consult our web-pages on research and our projects.
- If you have an idea for an interesting topic that matches the research area of one of our team members, you may also contact him/her and propose your own topic. The decision to supervise will be made by the potential supervisor.
