We are offline again due to a security incident affecting our core infrastructure. We had our first big hit in September 2019 where almost everything was offline for several days. Another second but smaller incident happened in June 2020 and then there were a series of minor incidents affecting specific systems over the years. On Monday night, another significant incident surfaced causing all of our IT infrastructure to be shut down, including the core network infrastructure. The key difference compared to the first big incident 4+ years ago is that some email and collaboration tools are meanwhile running in the cloud, so we do not have to put up papers to communicate.

I will supervise BSc thesis projects in Spring 2024. Since I have limited supervision capacity, I typically take the first N students following more or less a first-come, first-served strategy. I like to form clusters of students working on related topics, and I organize weekly (online) meetings with these clusters. We use a collaborative note taking tool to track progress. The work itself is taking place in two phases. In the first phase, students will dive into the state of the art of their topic, resulting in a state of the art report. I will review these reports and provide feedback. In the second phase, students focus on their own contribution, and they will finally write their thesis. The thesis naturally builds on the state of the art report and extends it with the work describing the contribution. Before submitting the thesis, students have to present and defend their work in the BSc thesis seminar. The seminar grade is given for the presentation. The thesis grade is given for the thesis report, the technical accomplishments, including the work organization (regular participation in weekly meetings and steady progress).

I will supervise BSc thesis projects in Spring 2023. Since I have limited supervision capacity, I typically take the first N students following more or less a first-come, first-served strategy. I like to form clusters of students working on related topics, and I organize weekly (online) meetings with the clusters. We use a collaborative note taking tool to track progress. The work itself is taking place in two phases. In the first phase, students will dive into the state of the art of their topic, and they produce a state of the art report. I will review these reports and provide feedback. In the second phase, students focus on their own contribution, and they will finally write their thesis. The thesis naturally builds on the state of the art report and extends it with the work describing the contribution. Before submitting the thesis, students have to present and defend their work. The seminar grade is given for the presentation. The thesis grade is given for the thesis report, the technical accomplishments, including the work organization (regular participation in weekly meetings and steady progress).

Below is a collection of ideas for student projects. I am mostly writing down topic clusters I am interested in as I strongly prefer to have multiple students working on related topics within a topic cluster.

If you are interested in systems-oriented computer science and computer security, talk to me in person. In general I expect that students have a solid understanding of operating systems and computer networks and that they are able to handle programming tasks well and that they can work independently.

We had the pleasure to be part of the Dagstuhl seminar Towards Climate-Friendly Internet Research, which took place on July 7–9, 2021. This was the first online Dagstuhl seminar we attended. While the online format was caused by the Corona pandemic, it actually made a lot of sense to hold the seminar in an online format given that the event was largely focused on the question how we can reduce the carbon footprint of the academic community, the network operator communities, and the standardization communities. A simple back of the envelope calculation of the carbon footprint of big network standardization meetings (the IETF runs three meetings a year with 1000+ people attending) leads to pretty gigantic numbers.

The German Accreditation Council has accredited our Computer Science BSc program on its meeting on September 29th, 2020. The accreditation is valid for the period from October 1st, 2020 to September 30th, 2028. Obtaining program accreditation is an intense process, a huge amount of documentation has to be produced and a group of independent evaluators visit the university to talk with leadership and administration, faculty and students. The process took about two years, and it did consume quite some resources. Is the result worth the time and money invested? This is a complex question. I believe that our Computer Science program improved by going through this (at times painful) process and we have to see to what extend our investment in much more precisely defined program handbooks and more effective quality management processes pays off in the future.

Below is a collection of ideas for student projects. Some are half-backed, some are not even written down. If you are interested in systems-oriented computer science and computer security, talk to me in person. In general I expect that students have a solid understanding of operating systems and computer networks and that they are able to handle programming tasks well.

It started on Thursday (around 8am) when our (meanwhile outsourced) email service started to refuse to authenticate me with a somewhat cryptic temporary failure error message during the SMTP authentication dialogue. I first hoped that this might be indeed a temporary failure. (Trust me, outsourced services do not work 24/7, at least not for me.) After roughly 24 hours, I lost patience and I engineered a different way to submit my emails (via some legacy local SMTP servers that still exist and were willing to accept my emails). With this workaround in place, I could work again as usual until around 6pm, when the SMTP dialogue started to hang. I quickly discovered that all central services are offline, I fear that the attack we experienced in September last year repeats - the second wave might have arrived.

Below is a collection of ideas for student projects. Some are half-backed, some are not even written down. If you are interested in systems-oriented computer science and computer security, talk to me in person. In general I expect that students have a solid understanding of operating systems and computer networks and that they are able to handle programming tasks well.

Last Friday, our central IT infrastructure, mostly running on Microsoft Windows, got infected by ransomware. All central systems were shutdown and a process started to reset them to the last (presumably) safe backup. Three days have passed since then and systems providing mail service (the communication service I rely on) are still not operational. It is amazing that it takes several days to restore regular service after such an attack.