Some Thesis Topics

I like to work in close contact with my students. In order to ensure that, I prefer to keep the size of my group small and I welcome applications from strongly motivated students. Most of my students published their theses in international conferences (below you can find some examples). Current thesis topics for bachelor and master students include:

  • Verification of the security of mobile applications (Android, Iphone).
  • Implementation and analysis of an electronic voting application for mobile devices (Android).
  • Design of privacy-preserving distributed applications based on trusted computing technologies.
  • Implementation of an efficient private information retrieval scheme for online behavioral advertising.
  • Implementation of a type-checker for enforcing linear authorization policies in functional languages.
  • Computational soundness of linear authorization policies
If you are interested in the above topics or if you have your own ideas for a thesis, just write me an e-mail or come to my office for an informal chat.

Student Publications

  • Stefan Lorenz (Master Thesis)

    Brief Announcement: Anonymity and Trust in Distributed Systems
    Michael Backes, Stefan Lorenz, Matteo Maffei, and Kim Pecina.
    Twenty-Ninth Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2010). (pdf)

    Anonymous Webs of Trust
    Michael Backes, Stefan Lorenz, Matteo Maffei, and Kim Pecina.
    10th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010). (pdf)
  • Marek Hamerlick (Master Thesis)

    Anonymity and Censorship Resistance in Unstructured Overlay Networks
    Michael Backes, Marek Hamerlick, Alessandro Linari, Matteo Maffei, Christos Tryfonopoulos, and Gerhard Weikum.
    17th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2009). (pdf)
    Also presented as a brief announcement at 27th Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2008).
  • Martin Grochulla (Master Thesis)

    Achieving Security Despite Compromise Using Zero-Knowledge
    Michael Backes, Martin Grochulla, Catalin Hritcu, and Matteo Maffei.
    22nd IEEE Symposium on Computer Security Foundations (CSF 2009). (pdf)
  • Stefan Lorenz (FoPra Thesis) and Kim Pecina (Bachelor Thesis)

    The CASPA Tool: Causality-based Abstraction for Security Protocol Analysis (Tool Paper)
    Michael Backes, Stefan Lorenz, Matteo Maffei, and Kim Pecina.
    20th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2008). (pdf)