External Projects
External Funding
BUTLER - uBiquitous secUre inTernet-of-things with Location and contEx-awaReness
Recent ICT advances are bringing to reality a world where sensors, actuators and smart portable devices are interconnected into an Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem reaching 50 Billion devices by 2015.The IoT major challenges are, from a systemic viewpoint, smart resource management and digital security; and from a user/service perspective, the pervasiveness(uniformity of performance anytime and anywhere) and awareness (inversely proportional to the degree of knowledge required from users). BUTLER will be the first European project to emphasize pervasiveness,context-awareness and security for IoT. Through a consortium of leading Industrial, Corporate R& D and Academic partners with extensive and complementary know-how, BUTLER will integrate current and develop new technologies to form a bundle of applications, platform features and services that will bring IoT to life.
ceFIMS - Coordination of the European Future of Internet forum of Member States
The ceFIMS project addresses the problem of the fragmentation of ICT research between European Member States (MS). ceFIMS will leverage its knowledge of Member state-funded research to gain consensus about problems and approaches at the Membe State level. ceFIMS will build on that consensus to promote alignment both across Member States and also between Member State and EC-funded ICT research. This will, consequently, unite better the European ICT research community and place European Future Internet (FI) research in a stronger position. ceFIMS will produce a research road-map to maximize synergies between EU and MS investments in FI research, establishing the basis for an ERA-NET+ on the Future Internet. An ERA-NET+will provide the means to develop the EU's strong research position. Allied to this, a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) will provide the means to transfer new knowledge into innovative products, with economic and social benefits for EU citizens. ceFIMS will increase awareness among Member States of the role that they can play in a Eruope-wide FI PPP and how Member State initiatives and the PPP can be aligned to the maximum extent possible. ceFIMS-Coordination of the European Future Internet forum of Member States-responds to Call 5 from the European Commission for European excellence in Trustworthy ICT. In particular, the Science and Technology objectives of ceFIMS are highly relevant to Objective ICT-2007.1.1 The Network of the Future.
OUTSMART - Provisioning of urban/regional smart services and business models enabled by the Future Internet
The goal of OUTSMART is to contribute to the Future Internet (FI) by aiming at the development of the innovation eco-systems. These eco-systems facilitate the creation of a large variety of pilot services and technologies that contribute to optimized supply and access to services and resources in urban areas. This will contribute to more sustainable utility provision and through increased efficiency, lower strain on resources and on the environment. Reaching this goal requires the whole value chain, namely city authorities, utilities operators, ICT companies as well as knowledge institutions in order to have an industry drive approach when developing advanced service and technologies. OUTSMART services and technologies will be based on an open and standardized infrastructure as envisioned by the FI Private Public Partnership (FI PPP) and provided by a service framework designed to facilitate provisioning, development and access. To this extend, OUTSMART will (1) deliver a set of detailed functional and non-functional requirements for an FI enabler platform and corresponding business framework able to support the above described eco-systems based on a deep analysis of the different domain specific use cases in the utility and environment application domain (2) proved a specification of the domain specific enabler functionality with corresponding service interfaces compatible and aligned with Core Platform components to be specified alongside this project effort; (3) provide a realization of prototypes of domain specific functionality for the envisioned eco-system according to the previous specification and a validation thereof in early field trials in the envisioned use cases; (4) deliver a business framework specification whitch serves as blue print for the foreseen local eco-systems able to provide their sustainability beyond the PPP funding lifetime by creating favorable conditions for local investments and innovations; and (5) deliver a detailed plan for pilot services in the envisioned local eco-systems, which act as initial light house show cases for Europe in the utility and environment applications domain.
SECRICOM - Seamless Communication for Crisis Management
SECRICOM is proposed as a collaborative research project aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions:
(A) Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crises communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs.
(B) Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents' infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application.
MOVE - Mobility Optimization Using Vehicular Network Technologies
The world is urbanizing rapidly. As a consequence, traffic congestion in metropolitan areas has significantly increased over the last two decades. Although there has been significant innovation in cars safety systems and fuel efficiency, traffic congestion remains one of the modern ills of our society. In most cases, existing road infrastructure cannot easily be extended to meet increasing traffic demand. As a consequence, commuters are often stuck for hours in traffic chaos, causing significant economic damage. New intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are currently being developed to increase traffic efficiency. The main idea is to maximize the use of existing road infrastructure using smart navigation systems that are aware of the current traffic conditions. Communication technologies will play an important role in the design of such systems. In the near future, vehicles will be equipped with communications devices that allow data exchange between cars and Road Side Units (RSUs). Such a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can be used to collect and distribute traffic metrics among nearby cars and RSUs and provide advanced navigation services. The aim of this project is to study and understand vehicular flow characteristics and propose new schemes using wireless communications technologies to reduce vehicular traffic congestion, enhance safety and at the same time reduce emissions. In this relatively new research area, there are multiple challenges. As a first step we will investigate how and where traffic information (e.g. speed, destination and local traffic density) can efficiently be retrieved from vehicles. Network planning and management need to be carefully studied in order to provide the required quality of service. Adapted routing and dissemination protocols that are able to cope with the changing dynamics of vehicular traffic need to be specified. Traffic Coordination Points (TCPs) will be responsible for collecting and evaluating traffic metrics for given area. this information will help to predict how the traffic will evolve in the near future. n this way, the TCPs can suggest, via the vehicular network, individual routes avoiding traffic jams, and thus shorten the travel time. In addition to advanced route planning services, this information can be used to dynamically adapt the timings of local traffic lights to maximize vehicular throughput. A realistic simulation environment will be implemented in a first phase to evaluate the performance of the proposed system under a variety of traffic scenarios. A practical prototype will be validated under real traffic conditions in Luxembourg city using the existing 'Hot City' mesh as its infrastructure network. Additional tests are foreseen at the UCLA campus, which provides a flexible testbed (up to 200 cars) to validate and test new communication protocols.
EPTV - EPT Vehicular Networks
A standard for vehicular ad hoc networks is expected during 2011. Within 15-20 years road transportation systems will be much different comparing to how we perceive them today – with intelligent vehicles as autonomous entities interacting with each other on the road. A main goal will be to increase traffic safety and reduce the environmental impact of the vehicular transportation system. the vision of the proposed research project is to develop efficient, secure and reliable communication networks to enable the transformation of the vehicular transport system of today to a greener, smarter and safer system. recent advances in sensor technology, low power electronics, radio-frequency devices, wireless communications, security and networking have enabled the engineering of intelligent vehicles and intelligent transport infrastructure, which have the potential to drastically increase road safety, decrease cost of transportation and contribute to a sustainable environment. This research will address 3 main areas of vehicular networks:
- Sensor and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
- Embedded Systems
- Applications and Services
Component Oriented Security Systems Modeling
In today's business landscapes security is a crosscutting concern passing organizational, software, and hardware issues. Assuming, that the future of business applications is component-based, distributed, and heterogeneous, security requirements (integrity, availability, confidentiality, accountability) must be defined, administrated, applied and monitored appropriately.
To solve this problem, security qualities of existing systems must be identified and assigned to their appropriate components, connectors, and configurations as a non-functional aspect. Security requirements must be reconstructed and matched with the identified security qualities to enable an efficient construction, maintenance and control of the overall security state of a socio-technical system (encompassing organizational, semantic (conceptual), logical, physical and technical issues).
The main objective of this research project is to deliver an essential contribution in the area of a simple and efficient composition, maintenance and control of heterogeneous and distributed components to configurations and systems building secure it business applications in a well-defined organizational and technical context.
GN2 - Joint Research Activity 5
Ubiquity (Mobility) and Roaming Access to Services
The project GN2 (Gigabit Network 2) is a pan-European research and infrastructure project, which is co-funded by the 6th R&D Framework Program of the European Commission. Its primary goal is to establish the world's most advanced gigabit network that interconnects researchers in entire Europe with up to 40 Gbit/s. This network carries an own name: the Geant2 network (Gigabit European Academic Network 2). Geant2 uses a new hybrid technology to establish the interconnection of its Points of Presence: parts of the network are traditionally routed (IPv4 & IPv6), other parts are connected via layer 2 switching to enhance response times and avoid IP routing engine delays. SECAN Lab participates actively in JRA5. Goal of this research activity is to enable scientists to use network and application resources independently of their location in Europe. They should be able to use their home login credentials to access other campus networks on the place they visit and be able to use resources of the visited places.
RSF1040103 FNR SECOM - SIM 2005-2007
Secure Identity management project takes part in the SECOM programme of FNR. The prime contractor is CRP-Tudor and the project leader is Dr Eric Dubois. The team of Pascal Bouvry at UL is in charge of providing the vision aspects. Which consists on defining and managing the concept of Trust in ad-hoc networks.
This is a 30 months projects in collaboration with the industry (CETREL, TELINDUS, KBL, COGNOSTIC, etc.).
UL Members: Prof Dr Pascal Bouvry, Dr Riad Aggoune, Apivadee Piyatumrong (BFR)
Contact : Pascal Bouvry
RSF1040105 FNR SECOM - TESEGRAD 2005-2007
The TESEGRAD project, Techniques for Secure Grids and Ad-Hoc Networks, aims at developing new tools and infrastructures for secure grid and ad-hoc computing. Existing tools face severe limitations that hinder their use in a truly distributed environment.
New algorithms for cryptography based upon secret and public key systems will be developed.
This new generation of tools aims at being lighter and more efficient in order to support embedded solutions.
They will be integrated in secure infrastructures.
TESEGRADis a 30 months FNR project (SECOM programmme) lead by Prof. Franck Leprevost. The team of Pascal Bouvry is in charge applying evolutionary computation for cryptology.
UL Members: Prof Dr Franck Leprevost, Prof Dr Pascal Bouvry, Nicolas Bernard, Minh Le Hoai (BFR), Gilbert Klein, André Stemper
Contact : Pascal Bouvry
Satellite Communication Security
Security Solutions for the ESA Ground Segment
Until now, none of the existing ESA spacecraft missions uses information security features to protect spacecraft commanding and telemetry. However, data security starts to play a very important role in order to counteract the more and more numerous security threads. Some of the upcoming ESA missions already have security requirements defined and proprietary security systems are being developed for these missions. As the need for security features in space missions is increasing, it is crucial that a generic approach is defined and possibly backed up by appropriate standardizations to reduce development and maintenance costs. The scope of this project is the definition of the required security features, a proposed approach for their integration into the existing standards and an analysis of the complications that come with them. This includes defining security layer locations in the space link communication protocol stacks and from this point identification of the ground segment infrastructure components that are needed to support them.
Secure Usage and Trust of Mobile Devices in Networks for international Banking Environments
Today customers want to check banking accounts as they check their emails to obtain an overview of their data and capital. Consultants need to have access to relevant information, if they visit customers at home, in restaurants or wherever the customers want to. Last but not least employees like administrators need to have access to the systems to manage them anytime to guarantee a failure-free service. Current security features in such banking environments are limited to passwords, RSA-tokens as well as dedicated notebooks and dedicated telephone lines. The service for customers is limited to a small set of services. Goal of this project is to replace existing solutions and to unify and extend the services for customers and employees, especially for mobile environments. To achieve this goal research is divided into three factors. The first factor is called HardProf (Hardware-Profile) and means the exploration of different parameters of the hardware. The second factor is called EnvProf (Environment-Profile), which covers certain factors from the environment, like how many users are in the area and are connected to an access point to estimate the risk of becoming attacked. The last factor covers the mobile device itself and is called UserProf (User-Profile). Hereby the behavior of the user will be examined, like pen or keyboard usage or the preferred mode of operation. The long-term goal is a security rating for mobile devices in an international banking environment.
Ubiquitous IP-centric Government & Enterprise NGN Vision 2010
u-2010
U2010 is a consortium of 16 industrial, governmental and scientific partners to address the strategic objective for Environmental Risk Management of the European ICT (information and communication technologies) sector. In-line with this objective U2010’s research is designed to support GMES in-situ monitoring systems (emerging self-organizing, ad hoc network technologies), public safety communication (alert systems, citizen communication, rapidly deployable emergency telecommunications systems) and convergence (early adoption of common open architectures). In particular, the project will improve the availability and reliability of a defined collection of ubiquitous services and existing networks incl. POTS ensuring public safety communication on critical infrastructures by leveraging redundant communication channels were ever possible and using automatic redirection or transformation of communications in case of network failures. The main focus will be on "bridging" networks, which are sometimes using the Internet Protocol (IP). Luxembourg was chosen as reference scenario because all the different networks involved in the scenarios are available and the lower size of the networks and the few interfaces necessary make it a perfect test bed. This project is funded by the European commission and is expected to launch in June/July 2006. Contract negotiations are ongoing.
Project Page : U-2010
ZipMode
ZipMode is a System for position estimation of commercial direct-to-home receiver. Such a system enables location based services (LBS) in interactive television (iTV). It is using the range difference of DVB-S links relayed by collocated satellites. To compensate the poor satellite geometry given by collocated satellites special techniques must be performed.
ETN- TRICE
Reasons:
The domain of computing is fast changing and dynamically evolving. Education has to support close relations with innovations and research. The project tries to establish links between training, research and innovation by means of introducing advanced educational programmes in computing education (CE).
The project consortium has successfully implemented and completed two thematic networks: ECET and DEC. As a result, comparable professional standards, curricula and syllabi of the three educational degrees have been developed. To close the whole cycle we must try to interlink teaching, research and innovations in the field of CE and training.
The current proposal will serve as a prerequisite for the preparation of a next proposal of the structural network type promoting the "knowledge triangle".
Outcomes and products:
Analysis of the links between education, research and innovations in CE.
Updated comparable curricula for Bachelors, Masters and Doctors.
Virtual Network of Innovative Educational Technologies Centres in CE.
Assessment parameters for the relevance of research topics for teaching.
Databases with teaching and research topics for bachelor and master degree students.
INFO-SYS Online Databases of Research Projects.
Three international e-Learning conferences.
Three international CompSysTech conferences.
Student's European-Job-Factory.
Impact:
Giving students the opportunity to do research at undergraduate level will encourage them to continue later with research activities and will also contribute to their overall motivation.
Getting the students involved in research will help them develop the necessary attitudes towards creating new knowledge, technologies, and innovations. It will also strengthen the position of higher education as education through research.
The influence of research and innovations on the educational process will result in developing new advanced educational programmes in the field of computing.
ETN TRICE will offer the computing industry a new relationship with education and research which will change the world of education too.
The Project has 70 partners from 31 Countries.
Project Page: ETN-TRICE
