UUlm – Institute of Distributed Systems

Information event of the institute for students for the summer semester 2026

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:57:00 +0100

The Institute of Distributed Systems is again offering an information event for students for the summer semester 2026, where we will provide information about our Bachelor's and Master's courses. We will also present our current project topics and thesis topics.

The event will take place on Tuesday, 14.04.2026, from 12:30 pm in room O27/341.

New DFG Project Approved

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:51:15 +0100

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Franz J. Hauck was able to get funding for a new DFG project, called Tenderex. The project is funded for three years and covers approaches for deterministic multithreading (DMT). Deterministic execution is a prerequisit for fault-tolerant services. The first task of the project is to compare existing approaches using the same application scenarios, identifying the best approach for each scenario. However, another task is to investigate new approaches. Software-transactional memory (STM) is a relatively light-weighted approach for aborting executions and resetting all of its effects. Such mechanism would allow to speculate, i.e. to tentatively start executions although it is not yet dertermined whether they should be executed this way. In worst case, the execution has to be aborted. Within the Tenderex project, it has to be investigated whether and how far tentative execution on average can improve the system behaviour, e.g. reduce response latency. Immediately for the start of the project, a new Ph.D. student, Christoph Denzel, could be acquired so that the project can start without any delay.

Successful award of a doctoral degree for Echo Meißner

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:25:04 +0100

We congratulate Echo Meißner on their successful award of a doctoral degree.

Echo Meißner, PhD student at our institute, completed their award of a doctoral degree on "Privacy Protection in Quantitative Empirical Research" on 14 October 2025 with "summa cum laude", which of course makes us particularly happy. In their dissertation, Echo focused on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, exploring a broad mix of cryptographic methods and technical security mechanisms such as Trusted Execution Environments. They integrated these elements into a complex overall system that enables empirical studies to be conducted with virtually no risk to the protection of personal data.

Successful award of a doctoral degree for Leonard Bradatsch

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:21:00 +0200

We congratulate Leonard Bradatsch on his award of a doctoral degree on 25 July 2025 with the topic: "Enabling Adaptive Zero Trust Networks".

Contributions to IEEE VNC 2025 in Porto

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:46:00 +0200

During this year's IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (IEEE VNC), Prof. Frank Kargl and Artur Hermann from the Institute of Distributed Systems at Ulm University presented a variety of our recent research results.
This included works on trust assessment in connected, cooperative, and automated mobility (CCAM) linked to the Horizon Europe project CONNECT and the BMFTR-funded project ConnRAD including one full paper on "Quantification Methods for Trust in Cooperative Driving" and a demo on our trust assessment framework (TAF).
In addition, we were also presenting a poster on a Mountainbike-to-Hiker Warning System that we developed together with researchers from the University of Trento.
IEEE VNC is the premiere conference dedicated exclusively to vehicular networking and the most important annual gathering of that research community.
Prof. Kargl is also a member of the steering committee of IEEE VNC and supported the conference through session moderation and as member of the TPC and the best paper selection committee.

More information on this year's VNC conference can be found at .

Conference Paper at IEEE WONDS 2025 in Hintertux, Austria

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:19:26 +0100

On 27.01.25, Frank Kargl and Michele Segata jointly presented their paper „Challenges and Initial Measurements on Communication and Localization for Mountain Bike Safety Applications“ at in Hintertux, Austria. The paper presents first results from our cooperation with Prof. Segata‘s group from University of Trento on using V2X for mountain bike scenarios. It included results from the M.Sc. theses of our co-authors Michele Zucchelli, Marcus Marx, and also Max Hörmann. The presentation was received with a lot of interest and spawned interesting discussion for our future research in this domain

Conference Paper on "Consensus-Agnostic State-Machine Replication" at Middleware'24

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:03:01 +0100

Alexander Heß (Research Group Prof. Dr.-Ing. Franz J. Hauck) presented our latest research results in the field of fault-tolerant, distributed systems at Middleware 2024 in Hong Kong. The paper, co-authored by Franz J. Hauck and Echo Meißner, describes a general approach and a prototypical toolkit that can implement state machine replication independently of specific consensus protocols. This approach simplifies the use of state machine replication as a fault tolerance strategy for clients and, based on an agnostic wrapper, allows the versatile selection or switch of the specific consensus protocol used.

is an important annual ACM/IFIP conference focusing on the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of distributed systems, platforms and architectures for computing, storage and communication. This year's conference was held at the Polytechnic University in Hong Kong.

Publication:

Workshop on CCAM Trust Assessment for Safety and Security

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:31:25 +0100

On December 11, 2024, experts from industry and academia gathered at the Institute of Distributed Systems, Ulm University, for a hybrid workshop to advance methods for assessing trustworthiness in cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM). The workshop addressed challenges that arise when considering the multifaceted nature of trustworthiness across safety and security domains and focused on integrating safety and security perspectives into a unified and holistic trust assessment approach. The workshop was co-organized by the EU-funded projects , , and the , as well as the BMBF-funded project .

The Institute would like to thank the funding agencies as well as the participants who contributed to this successful exchange.

Information event of the institute for students for the winter semester 2024/2025

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:45:36 +0200

The Institute of Distributed Systems is again offering an information event for students for the winter semester 2024/2025, where we will provide information about our Bachelor's and Master's courses. We will also present our current project topics and thesis topics.

The event will take place on Tuesday, 15.10.2024, from 12:30 pm in room O27/341.

Teaching Offers Winter Semester 2024/2025 are Available

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:03:36 +0200

The Institute of Distributed Systems has compiled and updated its teachong offers for the upcoming winter semester. All courses, projects and seminars are linked on our Teaching Portfolio page. For many courses the Moodle courses are already open for subscription. For the remaining courses Moodle will open soon.

Teaching Offers Summer Semester 2024 are Available

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 10:09:14 +0200

The Institute of Distributed Systems has compiled and updated its teachong offers for the upcoming summer semester. All courses, projects and seminars are linked on our Teaching Portfolio page. For many courses the Moodle courses are already open for subscription. For the remaining courses Moodle will open soon.

Teaching Offerings WiSe 2023

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:28:34 +0200

Our teaching offerings for the winter semester 2023areis now completely published on our teaching offerings website. In addition to the well-known (pro-)seminars, master projects and the possibility for theses, we offer the following lectures:

Advanced Research Topics on IT Security [EN]
2V+2Ü, 6LP, Lecture with semester project in cooperation with GUC, Cairo (in presence)
Blockchain Fundamentals [EN]
2V, 4 LP, Interdisciplinary lecture in cooperation with WiWi (in presence)
Embedded Security [EN]
2V+2Ü, 6LP, Lecture (online videos) with practical lab exercises (in presence)
Grundlagen der Rechnernetze / Vernetze Systeme
2V+2Ü, 5LP / 3V+2Ü, 6LP, Lecture (online, recorded + in presence) with lab (online, live)
Grundlagen Verteilter Systeme
3V+1Ü, 6LP, Lecture (online videos) with lab (in presence)

Unfortunately, the lecture "Privacy Engineering and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs)" cannot be offered this winter due to capacity reasons and is therefore cancelled. If you want to attend a lecture in the area of security, we recommend "Advanced Research Topics [...]" or "Embedded Security", both of which offer exciting and innovative content and teaching formats.

Successful Doctoral Graduation of Gerhard Habiger

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:32:17 +0100

Gerhard Habiger, Ph.D. student of Prof. Franz J. Hauck and former employee of the Institute, has successfully concluded his doctoral degree on January 30, 2023. In his thesis about Optimizing Deterministically Scheduled Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems, Gerhard Habiger developed mulitple optimisations in order to allow the efficient operation of fault-tolerant services by automatic configurations.

Congratulations to Dr. Pascal Oser on the successful defense of his PhD thesis

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 09:07:00 +0100

The Institute of Distributed Systems congratulates Dr. Pascal Oser on the successful defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Security Risks of IoT Devices: From Device Characteristics to Future Risk Score Predictions". Pascal defended on December 16, 22. After the defense, members of the institute handed over a highly creative doctoral hat.

EU PENTA Project Sunrise wins 2022 PENTA Innovation Award

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:38:40 +0100

We are happy to announce that the . We were happy to contribute to the project research on privacy-preserving machine learning.

Our Teaching in the Wintersemester 2022/23

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:22:18 +0200

In the winter semester 2022/23 we will have some important changes in our teaching. With this posting, we want to inform you about htem.

Security in IT-Systems: in anticipation of the new structure of the bachelor program, the lecture Sicherheit in IT-Systemen / Security of IT-Systems will be postponed to the summer semester 2023. It will not be offered in the winter semester 2022/23!
Embedded Security: there will be a new lecture on Embedded Security offered by our lecturer, Mr. Ferdinand Nölscher.
Blockchain Fundamentals: this new interdisciplinary lecture (2 SWS) will be offered by lecturers from economics and Prof. Kargl and will cover the topic of blockchains from the perspectives of computer science, law and economics.
Advanced Research Topics in IT-Security: this lecture was offered for the first time in the summer semester 2021 and will now take place again in the winter semester 2022/23. Current research publications in IT security and privacy will be introduced and discussed there. The lecture is offered in cooperation with the German University in Cairo and includes, among other things, joint project work in international student teams.
Proseminar Modern Aspects of Java Software Development: the proseminar KTT will be replaced by this proseminar. The main topic is still Java, but the scope is extended to development environments and tools

Beyond, we also offer the following lectures in the established form:

Introduction to Computer Networks
Introduction to Distributed Systems
Privacy Engineering and Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Distributed Computing Platforms in Practice
Bachelor/Master Seminars ATVS/RTDS
Project Computer Networks and IT Security I/II
Project Distributed Application, Platforms and Systems I/II
und of course our graduate seminar and all courses for the computer science teaching degree

We will add more information to our web pages in the coming weeks.

Benjamin Erb receives ProTrainU funding for research project PePER

Tue, 03 May 2022 07:57:54 +0200

At the end of April, Dr. Benjamin Erb from the Institute of Distributed Systems officially received start-up funding for young researchers from the Ulm University Graduate & Professional Training Centre. The internal funding program supports researchers at the beginning of their researching career.
The funding will support the prototypical development of a novel digital research platform that will meet specific privacy requirements. The platform uses technical protection mechanisms to implement pre-defined empirical studies and to secure the study data collected in the process. This makes the platform suitable for psychology and other empirical disciplines - especially when highly sensitive and sensitive private data have to be collected, stored and processed as part of the study.

More information: Ulm University News

Reykjavík Summer School on Secure and Reliable Distributed Systems, Application Open

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 10:38:04 +0100

Application is open. Deadline is March 31, 2022.

Congratulations to Dr. Felix Engelmann on the successful defense of his PhD thesis

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 08:59:35 +0100

The Institute of Distributed Systems congratulates Dr. Felix Engelmann on the successful defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Confidential Types in Transaction Systems". Felix defended on January 17, 22. After the defense, members of the institute handed over a highly creative doctoral hat.

KuVS Bachelor thesis award 2020 for Johannes Deger's thesis on RPKI Security (incl. video)

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:58:19 +0200

Our student Johannes Deger presented the results of his Bachelor thesis "State of RPKI-Deployment and Routing Security" and received the Bachelor thesis award 2020. A video of his presentation at NetSys 2021 is also on our . Congratulations from the whole Institute!!!

New presentation video of INFOCOM20 paper by Stephan Kleber online

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 12:09:47 +0200

We have a in . This time a presentation by Stephan Kleber from his paper "Message Type Identification of Binary Network Protocols using Continuous Segment Similarity" by S. Kleber, R.W. van der Heijden, F. Kargl. The paper was presented at IEEE INFOCOM 2020 and NetSys 21.

Full paper: ,

Members of the Institute of Distributed Systems as Co-Organizers of IEEE WONS Conference

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 09:51:53 +0100

Members of our institute helped co-organize this year's IEEE Wireless On-demand Network systems and Services Conference (). In its 16th edition, WONS remains an important event where the research community on wireless network systems meets and discusses the advance in ad-hoc and on-demand wireless networks . It was originally planned to happen in Klosters, Switzerland, with Christoph Bösch acting as General Vice-Chair and Local Arrangement Chair. After moving online due to the COVID pandemic, he then took charge for preparing a nice virtual chalet where attendees can meet online in . Frank Kargl supported the conference as member of the TPC as well as organizer of a special session on Smartphone Apps for Contact Tracing. The featured three top-class speakers, namely Marcel Salathé from EPFL, Tobias Klingbeil from SAP, and Zhiqiang Lin from Ohio State University who gave unique insights into a broad range of aspects of contact tracing apps.

Institute presents four papers at ACM SAC 2021

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 13:27:37 +0100

Our institute is happy to announce that a stunning total of four papers were accepted at the 36th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing and will be presented during the virtual conference from March 22 to March 26, 2021.

Gerhard Habiger and Franz J. Hauck co-authored a paper on "SmartStream: Towards Byzantine Resilient Data Streaming" together with Johannes Köstler and Hans P. Reiser from University of Passau.

A team from Ulm University and KU Leuven with Ala'a al-Momani as first author presented its research on "Land of the Lost: Privacy Patterns’ Forgotten Properties – Enhancing Selection-Support for Privacy Patterns".

And – last but not least – Echo Meißner and co-authors successfully submitted two papers, one on "PeQES: A Platform for Privacy-enhanced Quantitative Empirical Studies" and a poster paper on "WAIT: Protecting the Integrity of Web Applications with Binary-Equivalent Transparency".

We wish everyone involved a successful and exciting online conference.

ulm.digital 10x10 zu digitaler Bildung

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 12:33:55 +0100

Mit dem Greenboxstudio der in Blaustein-Dietingen war der perfekte Rahmen für einen Event gegeben, bei dem die Moderatoren und die Hälfte der Referentinnen und Referenten vor Ort, die restlichen Sprecher sowie das Publikum jedoch remote zugeschaltet waren. Dank Antigen-Schnelltests für alle Personen vor Ort war eine sichere Durchführung gewährleistet.

Doch wie kam es zu diesem Event? Kaum ein Thema wurde im letzten Jahr so intensiv diskutiert wie das der Digitalisierung im Bildungswesen. Lockdowns und Teilschließungen von Schulen zwangen Schülerinnen, Schüler und Schulen, aber auch die Hochschulen und selbst KiTas, beim Online-Learning ganz neue Wege zu gehen oder bereits vorhandene Ansätze drastisch auszubauen. Fragen, wie gut oder schlecht man zu Hause online lernen kann und ob unter den aktuellen Bedingungen faire Abschlussprüfungen überhaupt möglich sind, bewegen Familien im ganzen Land. Gleichzeitig legt die Pandemie schonungslos bisherige Versäumnisse bei der Digitalisierung und dem Ausbau unserer digitalen Infrastrukturen auf.

Ein spannendes Thema also, dass bei diesem ulm.digital 10x10 Event in insgesamt sechs Vorträgen beleuchtet. Zusammen mit Sabine Meigel (Stadt Ulm) und Daniela Reuther (Neu-Ulm) und unter Mitwirkung vieler weiterer engagierter Mitglieder der konnten wir ein buntes Portfolio an Themen zusammenstellen:

Sebastian Schmidt (Aicher-Scholl-Realschule Pfuhl) "Digitalisierung an Schulen – geht nicht, gibt’s nicht"
Monika Schmid & Christina Baumgartl (Stadt Ulm) "ulm.lernt"
Hanna Steuernagel & Florian Schechner (Hans & Sophie Scholl-Gymnasium Ulm) "Digitalisierung ja, aber nicht zu jedem Preis!"
Anita Müller (Gesamtleitung des Kinderhauses Donaukinder) "Das Tablet in der KiTa – Fluch oder Segen?"
Prof. Stefan Wesner (Leiter KIZ Uni Ulm) "Skalierbare Dienste für die Digitale Lehre durch Testing in Production"
Prof. Tina Seufert (Leiterin eLearningzentrum der Uni Ulm, Lehr- und Lernforschung) "Digitalisiertes Lehren und Lernen - worauf es ankommt"

Regio TV Ulm hat vor Ort auch gedreht.

Co-Chairing IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference 2020

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 10:58:00 +0100

From December, 16.-18. 2020, members of the Institute of Distributed Systems co-organized the as a virtual online conference. Prof. Frank Kargl acted as Co-General-Chair, Ala'a Al-Momani as Web-Chair and Dominik Mauksch took responsibility for large parts of the technical setup. Having 240 registered participants set a new record for VNC. Attendees especially like the format of pre-recorded presentation videos, compact daily online sessions with live keynotes and discussions, and the availability of Slack and Gather for interaction with other participants. Some voices called this the best online-conferences concept of the year 2020.