imec-DistriNet news

Cybersecurity: Strategic Research and Industry Impact

13/09/2022 On September 13, we will co-host the event 'Cybersecurity: Strategic Research and Industry Impact', at the Lamot Conference Center in Mechelen. The aim is to gather a wide range of cybersecurity stakeholders to discuss industry challenges and opportunities, to share knowledge and insights, and to finetune upcoming research priorities.
 

Summer School on Security and Privacy in the (golden) Age of AI

04/08/2022 From September 5 to 8 we organize our first summer school on Security and Privacy in the Age of AI, targeted to researchers and PhD students working on Security & Privacy and AI/ML. Central themes will be: How do ML solutions contribute to improvements in Security & Privacy? How will we ensure the robustness of ML applications and techniques in a context of attacks and adversarial behavior?
 

Summer School on Security Testing and Verification launched

03/06/2022 We are pleased to announce the first edition of our Summer School on Security Testing and Verification, a joined effort between KU Leuven and VUB. It is aimed at researchers and PhD students (computer science) who are interested in the fields of (dynamic and static) security testing, software verification, security by design, and more.
 

ERC Starting Grant for Dominique Devriese

21/03/2022 We are proud to announce that Dominique Devriese has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant by the European Research council. Congrats Dominique!
 

Enrolling now for Master of Cybersecurity 2022

11/02/2022 To meet society's high demand in trained cybsersecurity professionals and specialists, KU Leuven is launching a new 'Master of Cybersecurity' programme. This one-year programme is a joint effort of COSIC and DistriNet. Admissions for fall 2022 are open.
 

Victor Le Pochat reveals flaws in Facebook's identification of political ads

09/12/2021 New study makes it clear that Facebook, when making decisions on how to classify so-called undeclared ads, often misses political ads while incorrectly labeling others as political.
 

One, two, three Dissertation Awards for Jo Van Bulck

18/11/2021 All equally impressed by his dissertation, ERCIM, FWO/IBM and ACM SIGSAC lavished Jo Van Bulck with prestigious awards.
 

Congrats to Dominique Devriese on an ACM CCS 2021 Best Reviewer Award

17/11/2021 The dedicated reviewing work of Dominique Devriese was recognized with a Best Reviewer Award at the 2021 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
 

Mission Specialist Award of the Wi-Fi Alliance goes to Mathy Vanhoef

11/11/2021 Mentioning the work of Mathy on KRACK, Dragonblood and FragAttacks, the Wi-Fi Alliance lauds his contributions to the Alliance and its mission, his outstanding leadership and significant initiatives.
 

Distinguished Reviewer Award at IEEE EUROS&P 2021 for Vera Rimmer

23/09/2021 At Euro S&P 2021, Vera Rimmer was awarded a Distinguished Reviewer Award to recognize the quality, rigor, and constructive nature of her reviews. Congratulations to Vera for her hard work, even in an anonymous setting!
 

Kristof T'Jonck presents commissioning flow at DISCRETE closing event

31/08/2021 Kristof T'Jonck contributes to non-invasive solutions for the monitoring of integrated sensors in healthcare management at care homes.
 

Koustabh Dolui and Oleksandr Tomashchuk contribute to HEART closing event

06/07/2021 Koustabh Dolui and Oleksandr Tomashchuk contributed to the closing event of HEART, the project that investigated the security of activity recognition in digitized healthcare.
 

Mathy Vanhoef identified vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi security

12/05/2021 Mathy Vanhoef identified various flaws in the security of Wi-Fi connections. Attackers could take advantage of these weaknesses to get access to private data. It is likely that the flaws affected all Wi-Fi appliances.
 

Yana Dimova uncloaks increasingly invasive CNAME cloaking technique

25/02/2021 Kudos to Yana Dimova, Wouter Joosen and Tom Van Goethem for their work on CNAME cloaking, a major threat to web security and privacy. This DNS-based tracking scheme renders current defenses that block third-party cookies ineffective, unless they have targeted measures in place.
 

Fritz Alder and his colleagues 'poisoned' an FPU, see here what happened

09/12/2020 Congratulations to Fritz Alder, Jo Van Bulck, and Frank Piessens! Their paper 'Faulty Point Unit: ABI Poisoning Attacks on Intel SGX´ won an 'ACSAC2020 Distinguished Paper with Artifacts Award'.
 

Laurens Sion makes LINDDUN GO digital

30/11/2020 How to play LINDDUN GO when your team is working from home? You can now use the brand new digital variant of our lightweight LINDDUN threat modeling family member. Exactly what you need when respecting physical distancing!
 

Kim Wuyts co-authored the Threat Modeling Manifesto

26/11/2020 Implementing threat modeling? For many organizations, this is still a struggle. That motivated DistriNet's Kim Wuyts to join an international team of prominent security and privacy experts in drawing up the Threat Modeling Manifesto.
 

Zero-Wire: SenSys2020 Best Paper Award for Jonathan Oostvogels

20/11/2020 Congratulations to Jonathan Oostvogels on his SenSys2020 Best Paper Award for 'Zero-Wire: A Deterministic and Low-Latency Wireless Bus through Symbol-Synchronous Transmission of Optical Signals.'
 

'An Introduction to Self-adaptive Systems' by Danny Weyns

03/11/2020 Self-adaptive systems can change with their environment and still remain reliable. Self-adaptation will be a crucial enabling feature in tackling the challenges of new, emerging, and future systems. It is the focus of the new book 'An Introduction to Self-adaptive Systems: A Contemporary Software Engineering Perspective' by our DistriNet colleague Prof. Danny Weyns.
 

OneSpan Master Thesis Award for Márton Bognár

16/09/2020 Our PhD student Márton Bognár won the OneSpan Master Thesis Award for his thesis 'Analyzing side-channel leakage in secure DMA solutions.' Congratulations, Márton, and looking forward to more of your work!
 

'De Cyber Arena' by Vincent Naessens

15/09/2020 In his book 'De Cyber Arena', Vincent Naessens identifies the growing digital threats. On the basis of remarkable cyber incidents, he takes the reader on a journey into the reality of digital showdowns.
 

Load Value Injection: a new security flaw in Intel processors

10/03/2020 Jo Van Bulck and Frank Piessens gave the manufacturer one year time to fix the problem. Now that the embargo has lifted, the KU Leuven team and their colleagues in Austria, the United States, and Australia can share their findings.
 

Plundervolt exposes vulnerability in security technology of Intel processors

11/12/2019 DistriNet scientists Jo Van Bulck and Frank Piessens, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Birmingham, and TU Graz, have shown that the possibility to adjust the operating voltage of Intel processors makes them vulnerable to attack.
 

Khronos, a Middleware for Simplified Time Management in Cyber-Physical Systems

30/06/2019 Stefanos Peros wins the Best Research Paper Award at ACM DEBS 2019 for his paper on Simplified Time Management in Cyber Physical Systems.
 

Distinguished Paper Award for 'A Smörgåsbord of Typos' by Victor Le Pochat

23/05/2019 At the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity, Victor Le Pochat received the Distinguished Paper Award for his research paper on International Keyboard Layout Typosquatting.
 

BELCLIV 2019 Award for Outstanding Master Thesis Hans Winderix on Security Enhanced LLVM

22/05/2019 The BELCLIV jury decided to award the Master thesis of Hans Winderix for its outstanding quality. Hans researched the feasibility of an open platform for secure compilation using different abstraction levels.
 

Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow: what's next?

22/05/2019 An international team of researchers, including Jo Van Bulck, discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows resurrecting sensitive data and keys. The Fallout attack allows to read data that the operating system recently wrote and to figure out the memory position of the operating system.
 

Detection of Algorithmically Generated Domain Names used by Botnets: A Dual Arms Race

18/04/2019 Jan Spooren received the SAC 2019 Best Paper Award for his paper on the detection of algorithmically generated Domain Names typically used in Malware.
 

Interview with Professor Pierre Verbaeten on 30 years "world wide web"

12/03/2019 The World Wide Web is 30 years old, but in 1989 'the Web' was quite different from what we know today. Pierre Verbaeten, Professor Emeritus of the DistriNet Research Group , talks about how it all started in Belgium in an interview with VRT News.
 

CyberSec4Europe: launch of a European Cybersecurity Competence Network

26/02/2019 This week representatives of the European Commission signed the grant agreement launching the CyberSec4Europe project. The proposal was submitted in response to the call under Horizon 2020 to establish and operate a pilot for a Cybersecurity Competence Network and to develop and implement a common cybersecurity research and innovation roadmap.
 

Jesper Cockx wins EAPLS PhD Disseration Award 2017/18

19/12/2018 The European Association on Programming Languages and Systems awarded Jesper Cockx with the EAPLS Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2017/18 for his dissertation on "Dependent Pattern Matching and Proof-Relevant Unification". His thesis was supervised by Prof. Frank Piessens and Dr. Dominique Devriese.
 

Best Paper Award at ECSA 2018 for joint research by DistriNet and VersaSense on Management of IoT

29/09/2018 A joint paper of DistriNet and VersaSense on 'Applying Architecture-based Adaptation to Automate the Management of Internet-of-Things' received the best paper award at the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2018).
 

Bypasses of Third-party Cookie Policies in all Major Browsers and Extensions

22/08/2018 Research by Gertjan Franken, Tom Van Goethem and Wouter Joosen from KU Leuven received the USENIX Security 2018 Distinguished Paper Award as well as the $100,000 Internet Defense Prize. In the research paper, the authors show that most browsers, and all anti-tracking and ad-blocking extensions are susceptible to the various bypass techniques that were discovered.
 

Foreshadow: A new speculative execution attack on Intel processors

14/08/2018 Jo Van Bulck, Frank Piessens, Raoul Strackx, and their collaborators from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, University of Michigan and The University of Adelaide present a paper at Usenix Security 2018 this week where they explain a new attack technique that breaks Intel SGX, a security technology built into recent Intel processors.
 

What can hardware security learn from software security?

19/06/2018 Recently, hardware designers are confronted with software controlled attacks exploiting hardware vulnerabilities. Examples are the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. At ITF Belgium 2018, Frank Piessens discussed this challenge and compared it to similar challenges faced by software designers.
 

MSc student Paves the way for mobile LoRa-based IoT applications

15/06/2018 A paper based on the MSc thesis of Robbe Berrevoets is accepted at IEEE SASO'18. In his thesis, Robbe addressed the current complexity to optimally configure LoRa devices in such a way that network communication remains reliable when the device moves, while it's battery consumption is kept minimal.
 

KRACK attack exemplary for Reuters' nomination of KU Leuven as most innovative university of Europe

27/04/2018 For the third year in a row, Reuters nominates KU Leuven as most innovative university of Europe. The discovery of a weakness in the WPA2 protocol by Mathy Vanhoef in October 2017 was mentioned as an example to motivate this nomination.
 

Research on Interaction-based LINDDUN Threat Modeling wins Best Paper Award at IWPE'18

27/04/2018 Laurens Sion received the best paper award at 2018 International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'18) for his work on interaction-based LINDDUN threat modeling.
 

How to avoid an Internet-of-Insecure-Things in your Smart Home

23/04/2018 The BELCLIV/CLUSIB jury has decided to award Dimitri Jonckers for his master thesis; "A security mechanism for the Internet of Things in a smart home context" is considered to be an original contribution to the security of information systems.
 

VERSASENSE NAMED IOT SENSOR COMPANY OF THE YEAR

09/01/2018 THIEF RIVER FALLS, MN, USA and LEUVEN, Belgium ? VersaSense, today announced that it has been selected as winner of the 2018 'IoT Sensor Company of the Year' award from IoT Breakthrough.
 

A distributed data analytics architecture supports effective learning in classrooms

14/12/2017 The imec.ICON project LECTURE+ focuses on a decision support platform for teachers. DistriNet's contribution to the project is a distributed, near real-time, data analytics architecture. The ability to process heterogeneous data streams of user engagement information is key.
 

On the application of Deep Learning Techniques to Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses

14/12/2017 Toghether with Marc Juarez, Vera Rimmer received the research forum award at DLSW 2017 in Signapore. Vera and Marc evaluated a traffic analysis attack based on deep learning techniques that allowed them to extract features automatically. They show that the attack's performance is comparable to that of traditional attacks, while eliminating the need for feature design and selection. They argue that this may be a game-changer in the arms-race between Website Fingerprinting attacks and defenses.
 

Interview with Matias Madou - A decade of mitigating injection vulnerabilities

11/12/2017 As new attacks are announced almost weekly, building secure software seems unfeasible. However, many high-profile attacks are not the result of such new attacks. Instead, they are caused by well-known vulnerabilities.
 

Interview with Mathy Vanhoef - The dangers of an unprotected channel

24/11/2017 Wireless networks are inherently insecure. We all know this, yet we still connect to almost every network we can find. But how dangerous is this? And how skilled does an attacker need to be to launch an attack on a wireless network? In this interview with DistriNet's own Mathy Vanhoef, we discuss and demonstrate the ramifications of our behavior. Since the interview has been recorded, Mathy has rocked the entire security world with his work on the KRACK attacks.
 

Workflow Cloudification: flexible scaling and deployment of simulation workflows for Aerospace and Automotive Industries

20/11/2017 Engineers in major industries use simulation and optimization workflows in their design process. Typical examples are Aerospace and Automotive industries. In collaboration with NOESIS, DistriNet researchers developed a cloud-based architecture for simulation workflows.
 

Interview with Maarten Decat - Authorization throughout the application

14/11/2017 Preventing unauthorized access lies at the root of every security system. This interview with Maarten Decat, CEO of Elimity, focuses on various aspects of authorization. You will learn how even large enterprises struggle to get access control right. But what can you do to get it right in your application? Learn about a couple of essential principles to get access control right. 
 

KU Leuven ICTS launches DingNet, an IoT Testbed for students and researchers

25/10/2017 The Internet of Things (IoT) is the future. Annemie Depuydt invites all KU Leuven students and researchers to start experimenting with IoT technology. In collaboration with VersaSense, a DistriNet spin-off company, KU Leuven ICTS installed DingNet.
 

Vulnerabilty threat in WPA2 protocol

16/10/2017 Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens detected a major vulnerability in the WPA2 protocol which secures all protected Wi-Fi networks. This weakness can be exploited by attackers to steal sensitive information like passwords or credit card numbers.
 

Web Security Fundamentals course one of most popular MOOCs starting in October 2017.

09/10/2017 DistriNet launched the Web Security Fundamentals course. The free online course started with about 4000 people joining from all over the world. Because of this huge interest, the course is one of the ten most popular course on Class Central this month.
 

Key challenges for BPaaS providers: supporting secure interoperability and scalable customization.

13/09/2017 Online software service providers, which include application service providers (ASP) and software as a service providers (SaaS), are evolving and extending their services towards a business process outsourcing (BPO) model. BPO comprises the delegation of many steps of a company's business processes to a specialized online software service provider. Business process as a service (BPaaS) can be defined as the offering of outsourced software services that encapsulate business processes. In DistriNet's research line on BPaaS, we have investigated and tackled key research challenges on interoperability and customizability.
 

Best Paper Award at BigDataSE-17

18/08/2017 At the 11th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering Ansar Rafique received the Best Paper Award for the paper: Leveraging NoSQL for Scalable and Dynamic Data encryption in Multi-Tenant SaaS.
 

VersaSense MicroPnP Line of Wireless Sensing and Actuation Products available globally from Digi-Key

18/05/2017 VersaSense's MicroPnP line of wireless sensing and actuation products for the Industrial IoT are available for immediate shipment worldwide through Digi-Key Electronics, a global electronic components distributor, as a result of a new distribution agreement.
 

Jo Van Bulck awarded by BELCLIV for his original contribution to ICT Security

28/04/2017 Jo Van Bulck's MSc Thesis on 'Secure Resource Sharing for Embedded Protected Module Architectures' is awarded by BELCLIV for the original contribution to ICT Security. This is the second award for Jo's Master thesis: in 2015 he also received the VASCO award.
 

Best Poster Award for Ansar Rafique

19/04/2017 At the 32nd ACM SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing Ansar Rafique received the Best Poster Award for the paper: Towards Scalable and Dynamic Data Encryption for Multi-Tenant SaaS.
 

MicroPnP supports award-winning health platform for the developing world

31/03/2017 In collaboration with VersaSense, DistriNet researchers Gowri Ramachandran and Pierce Lawrence used the MicroPnP Internet of Things platform to create a smart medical fridge for the developing world. The LoRaMediFridge project received the 2nd prize from over 230 entries in the LoRa Alliance Challenge at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain and won the best paper award at the AfrikaTek 2017 Conference in Marrakech, Morocco.
 

intigriti: the first Belgian bug bounty platform activates ethical hackers to improve security of online services

21/03/2017 intigriti is the first Belgian platform that activates ethical hackers in the search for security vulnerabilities in online services of companies. The startup adresses both companies looking to improve their online security as well as ethical hackers willing to offer their services to companies within a legal framework. intigriti is the initiative of Stijn Jans, The CoFoundry and KU Leuven and builds upon the expertise of the DistriNet research group.
 

Making car electronics safe again - a new security architecture for networked embedded devices

08/03/2017 Jan Tobias Muhlberg, research manager at imec - DistriNet, KU Leuven, explains how researchers at imec have developed a new security architecture for networked embedded devices, carefully designed to secure not only smart vehicles, but also other critical infrastructure, e.g. medical equipment, smart buildings, or power grids.
 

Yolande Berbers in Knack Magazine: Girls and Science, a perfect match!

14/02/2017 The UN proclaimed Februari 11 as the international day for women in science: 'The world needs science and science needs women'. On this occasion Knack Magazine interviewed Professor Yolande Berbers on her research on software for embedded systems. She is a clear fan of more STEM (Science - Technology - Engineering - Mathematics ) in school for youngsters between 12 and 18, girls and boys alike.
 

DistriNets Internet of Things technology supports the health sector in the DR Congo.

23/01/2017 Over the past few months imec-DistriNet researchers have been rolling out Internet of Things technologies to support the health sector in the DR Congo. Their LoRaMediFridge has been deployed to monitor blood supplies at the provincial center for blood transfusion in Kikwit in the DR Congo, a town of over 1.2 million inhabitants without any fixed-line electricity infrastructure and shaky access to safe drinking water.
 

imec-DistriNet researchers make drones dance

16/01/2017 In february 2016, choreographer Ugo Dehaes from 'kwaad bloed' contacted researchers from imec-DistriNet to discuss ideas and possibilities to use drones in a new, exciting dance show called RATS. A team of enthusiastic researchers volunteered to assist in analyzing the project feasibility and to develop the drones software and their choreography
 

Inmanta wins Call for Innovation by Swisscom, Telia and Proximus

15/12/2016 Proximus selected Inmanta the winner of its first Call for Innovation for its end-to-end orchestrator. Proximus committed to do a proof of concept (PoC) in the field of SDN / NFV using Inmanta's orchestrator.
 

SuperMinds Talk: Nature inspired software engineering for distributed logistics systems by Rinde van Lon

24/11/2016 At SuperMinds, imec's annual community event, Rinde van Lon presented his ongoing PhD research on bio-inspired optimisation.
 

Enhancing application-level access control in cloud applications with ACE.

03/10/2016 The architecture of today's cloud applications exposes two challenging properties: application-level multitenancy in a SaaS architecture, as well as extreme distribution in the more recent micro-service architectures. Both architectural properties often occur at the same time.
 

Merger between centers imec and iMinds completed

22/09/2016 Since yesterday, the merger between research centers imec and iMinds - announced on February 19 - has been completed. The deed of merger was officially signed in Brussels, in the presence of Flemish minister-president Geert Bourgeois and Flemish minister for work, the economy, innovation and sport Philippe Muyters.
 

3 DistriNet papers accepted at the USENIX Security Symposium 2016.

08/06/2016 DistriNet will be well represented at the 25th USENIX Security Symposium on August 10-12, 2016 in Austin, Texas. Tom Van Goethem, Raoul Strackx and Mathy Vanhoef will be presenting their latest research at this top level security conference.
 

Dawn: Building extremely flexible, yet dependable IoT networks

08/04/2016 At the WISCA & CompArch 2016 Conference Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Wilfried Daniels and Nelson Matthys received the best paper award for the paper:"Building dynamic and dependable component-based IoT applications with Dawn".
 

MicroPnP: Plug-and-Play Climate Control for Data Centers

07/03/2016 iMinds-DistriNet successfully deployed their Micro Plug-and-Play (MicroPnP) technology to manage the server room temperature and humidity conditions at the KU Leuven Department of Computer Science.
 

CloudPiercer: Bypassing Cloud-based Security Providers

22/02/2016 The increased risk of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, combined with the constant required alertness for mitigating web application threats, has caused many website owners to turn to Cloud-based Security Providers (CBSPs) to protect their infrastructure. These solutions typically involve the rerouting of traffic from the original website through the CBSP's network, where malicious traffic can be detected and absorbed before it ever reaches the servers of the protected website. The most popular Cloud-based Security Providers do not require the purchase of dedicated traffic-rerouting hardware, but rely solely on changing the DNS settings of a domain name to reroute a website's traffic through their security infrastructure. In other words, they are hiding the hosting website's IP address (the so-called "origin") and relying on redirection through the use of the website's domain name.
 

Application-level multi-tenancy: efficient customization of multi-tenant SaaS

15/02/2016 Software as a Service (SaaS) has been increasingly adopted by software vendors as their main software delivery model, as it provides the opportunity to offer their software applications to a larger market and to benefit from the economies of scale. If well-achieved by the SaaS provider, these benefits add value to the offering and reduce the operational costs of hosting and maintaining the SaaS application. As explained in our previous article of this series, one of the key enablers to leverage economies of scale is multi-tenancy: resources are shared among multiple customer organizations (the so-called tenants), which leads to higher resource utilization and scalability. The highest degree of resource sharing is achieved with application-level multi-tenancy: end users from different tenants are simultaneously served by a single application instance on top of shared hardware and software infrastructure.
 

It's Free for a Reason: Exploring the Ecosystem of Free Live Streaming Services

04/02/2016 The massive consumption and endorsement of online video brought with it the rise of extremely popular services for free live streaming (FLIS). FLIS services enable free viewership of video content of TV channels and live events for Internet users. These services manage infrastructure to facilitate costless anonymous broadcasting of live streams, and maintain websites to index links for free live streams. Despite the immense popularity of these services, there has been no study that systematically analyzes the workings of different FLIS parties and empirically assesses the threats for everyday users of FLIS services.
 

Advanced attacks with cheap off- the-shelf Wi-Fi dongles

16/12/2015 In an interview with the Campuskrant Mathy Vanhoef explains how low-layer attacks against Wi-Fi can be implemented using user-modifiable firmware. Hence cheap off- the-shelf Wi-Fi dongles can be used to carry out advanced attacks.
 

iMinds-DistriNet awarded third place at the international IPSO Challenge for IoT technologies

03/12/2015 San Jose December 2, 2015. The microPnP team of iMinds-DistriNet has been awarded third place in the international IPSO Challenge competition.
 

VeriFast program verification technology presented at Facebook London Faculty Meeting 2015

23/09/2015 September 22, 2015, Facebook London offices. Bart Jacobs, associate professor at DistriNet, was invited to give a talk at the Facebook London Faculty Meeting 2015. He presented the VeriFast program verification technology which his team has been developing since 2008.
 

Six TWINNING projects with KU Leuven selected by European Commission

22/09/2015 KU Leuven strengthens its collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, University of Malta, University of Tartu (Estonia), Technical University of Varna (Bulgaria), University of Lisbon (Portugal), University of Macerata (Italy).
 

Usenix Best Student Paper Award for Mathy Vanhoef

19/08/2015 At the 24th Usenix Security Symposium Mathy Vanhoef received the Best Student Paper Award for the paper: All Your Biases Belong To Us: Breaking RC4 in WPA-TKIP and TLS.
 

And the Vasco award 2015 goes to ..... Jo Van Bulck

07/07/2015 Jo Van Bulck wins the 2015 Vasco Award with his Master thesis on protected module architectures and secure resource sharing. His work was supported by the Prof. Frank Piessens and his team, who are now happy to welcome Jo at DistriNet to write his next thesis as PhD student.
 

Application-level multi-tenancy: the promise and pitfalls of shared-everything architectures

27/04/2015 SaaS providers aim for economy of scale: multiple customers (tenants) must be serviced on a common infrastructure/platform or software application. As such, application service providers (ASPs, and more recently SaaS providers) have evolved their deployment architecture from strict hardware separation between tenants towards an increasing level of sharing between tenants. This process is mainly driven by scalability and maintainability reasons.
 

Congrats to Master students winning the 1st Cyber Security Challenge Belgium!

24/03/2015 On Friday March 20, 10 teams of up to 4 Master students competed against each other in the finals of the Cyber Security Challenge Belgium 2015. The team "HacknamStyle Jr." won the security contest and went home with a set of new laptops. "HacknamStyle Jr" are three security enthusiasts, which participate on a regular basis with the KU Leuven DistriNet CTF team called "Hacknam Style" in international security competitions.
 

Electric Vehicles and the Electricity Grid of the Future

19/03/2015 In recent years, the increase in the amount of electric vehicles is gaining momentum, as global environmental concerns are getting stronger, and automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) are preparing for mass-production. This vast increase of grid-connected vehicles offers opportunities to use electric vehicles as a large-scale distributed storage system. In a liberalized electricity market, aggregators are typically seen as the actors who will manage this storage system.
 

Softlaunch Media ID

20/02/2015 From February 2013 until May 2014 DistriNet was the lead research partner of the Media ID research project. The goal of this project was to enable the Flemish media companies to extend and better support their relation with their customers in order to service them in a better way. One of the high priorities of this research project was the protection of the privacy of personal data
 

Seven Months' Worth of Mistakes: A Longitudinal Study of Typosquatting Abuse

20/01/2015 Typosquatting is the act of purposefully registering a domain name that is a mistype of a popular domain name. It is a concept that has been known and studied for over 15 years, yet still thoroughly practiced up until this day.
 

Primer on Client-Side Web Security

19/01/2015 Have you ever wondered why all of a sudden, normal users start posting strange messages on social networks? How wireless routers can be controlled remotely? Why eBay accounts could be hijacked with a single HTTP request? Or why a news Web site suddenly shows a page from the Syrian Electronic Army? All of these incidents were possible due to attackers controlling some code within the victim?s browser, a result of the current state of practice in Web security, which is less than stellar.
 

Lieven Desmet guest editor of IEEE Internet Computing magazine on "Security and the Real-Time Web"

16/01/2015 Lieven Desmet (iMinds-DistriNet) en Martin Johns (SAP) investigated the security of WebRTC as part of the ongoing FP7 project STREWS. They discuss some of the important open challenges in securing WebRTC in a recent article in the IEEE magazine Internet Computing, of which both Lieven and Martin were invited to be guest editor.
 

BUTLER: Enabling the development of secure and smart life assistant applications thanks to a context and location aware, pervasive information system

17/12/2014 The final results of the FP7 project BUTLER (uBiquitous, secUre inTernet-of-things with Location and contExt-awaReness) are now available. This project has been a major contributor to Internet-of-Things research in Europe with an integrated horizontal concept that includes location-awareness, end-to-end secure communication, user-identity and behaviour awareness, contextualised services and integration of smart technologies.
 

Soundsquatting: Uncovering the Use of Homophones in Domain Squatting

19/11/2014 While researching generic cybersquatting Nick Nikiforakis, Marco Balduzzi, Lieven Desmet, Frank Piessens, and Wouter Joosen uncovered Soundsquatting. Soundsquatting is a domain squatting technique which takes advantage of the sound similarity of words and the user's confusion of which word represents the desired concept.
 

Paper on predicting Software Vulnerabilities wins Best Paper Award at ISSRE'14

07/11/2014 The publication "Predicting Vulnerable Components: Software Metrics vs Text Mining" won the Best Paper Award at ISSRE'14. Together with James Walden and Jeffrey Stuckman, Riccardo Scandariato used a high quality public dataset to compare vulnerability prediction models based on text mining with models using software metrics as predictor and found that text mining models had higher recall than software metrics based models.
 

Hacknam Style CTF Team growing stronger

05/11/2014 In the previous months, the KU Leuven DistriNet CTF team called "Hacknam Style" has silently been achieving great results in online CTF competitions. For instance, after a fierce two day competition in the weekend of 11 and 12 October, they finished 3rd out of 230 teams in the ASIS CTF competition. More recently, in the Hack.lu CTF competition from 21 to 23 October, they finished 14th out of 581 teams.
 

WebSand: In-built Security for a safer web experience

27/10/2014 EU researchers, among which an number of DistriNet researchers have come up with an innovative security framework that gives both web users and developers greater protection against cyber attacks.
 

Context-aware intelligence in the Cloud: Nayyab Naqvi wins Best paper award at INTELLI 2014

20/08/2014 Syeda Nayyab Zia Naqvi was awarded the best paper for "Dynamic Deployment and Reconfiguration of Intelligent Mobile Cloud Applications Using Context-driven Probabilistic Models"
 

DistriNet paper on Intelligent and Scalable Internet of Things scores at Intelligent Environments Conference

09/07/2014 The DistriNet team of Yolande Berbers and Davy Preuveneers won two awards at the Intelligent Environments conference, including the 'Best Full Paper award' and the Micro-SFP award.
 

Cloud-toepassingen makkelijker en veiliger delen - column

25/06/2014 Cloud-toepassingen bieden tal van voordelen, maar gaan gepaard met een aantal uitdagingen. Dankzij Vlaams onderzoek wordt het delen van cloud-toepassingen nu makkelijker en veiliger.
 

Data protection in the world of e-Health: an interview with Kim Wuyts

09/05/2014 The KU Leuven newsletter 'science@leuven' publishes an interview with Kim Wuyts. Kim's current PHD research focuses on data protection in an e-health setting. In the interview (Dutch only) she explains why she chose to study informatics and why her domain of expertise is so fascinating.
 

Media ID will be launched after summer time

09/04/2014 At the event "Your Idea brought to life" the announcement was made that the valorisation of the Media ID project will be launched after summer time. Media ID is a personal login and payment instrument that provides easy access to media sites, media applications and media services.
 

The OPEES project, supporting open source developments, wins the ITEA2 Vice-President's award for 'community building'

09/12/2013 At the Annual ITEA and ARTEMIS Co-Summit, the OPEES project was awarded the ITEA2 Vice-Presidenst's award for 'Community building'.
 

Reducing the power of attackers: DistriNet thesis on securing Linux apps selected for Agoria Award 2013

08/11/2013 The DistriNet master thesis by Niels Avonds is one of the 12 theses selected for the Agoria Award 2013. On november 22nd three finalists will be selected to present their work to the jury.
 

Belgacom Hacked: how can companies protect themselves against spies?

16/09/2013 In an interview for Terzake Prof. Frank Piessens explains that every system that communicates with the outside world is vulnerable for attacks. Even state-of-the- art-defense systems leave possible entree points for high tech spies with enough time and money to find them.
 

Walking in the Clouds: DistriNet wins Best Paper Award at IE 2013

23/07/2013 At the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Environments - IE'13, Davy Preuveneers received the Best Paper Award for the paper "Walking in the Clouds: Deployment and Performance Trade-offs of Smart Mobile Applications for Intelligent Environments"
 

Cyber defense: What do we really need?

02/05/2013 The Belgian government is strongly committed to combat cybercrime. Statements in the press last week acknowledge that "the cyber threat is real" and "investments are needed to increase protection", and once again confirm the necessary commitment.
 

iMinds becomes a member of EIT ICT Labs KIC

29/04/2013 EIT ICT Labs and iMinds are announcing today that iMinds is becoming an Associate Partner of EIT ICT Labs. The membership strengthens iMinds' collaboration with some of Europe's most prestigious business and research institutes and supports EIT ICT Labs' mission to make Europe a global leader in ICT innovation.
 

Hackers like their privacy

02/04/2013 With websites being compromised left and right, and their data leaked to the rest of the world, privacy has never been a hotter topic. Everyone agrees that they want to keep their own privacy, especially malicious hackers or blackhats. But how do they deal with the privacy of the people whose data they are leaking?
 

'Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming' - a new book by Dave Clarke

20/03/2013 In collaboration with Tobias Wrigstad of Uppsala University and James Noble of Victoria University of Wellington, Dave Clarke has published a book on 'Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming' as a Springer LNCS State-of-the-Art Survey. This book covers techniques for dealing with aliasing in object-oriented programming, and marks the 20th anniversary of the paper The Geneva Convention On The Treatment of Object Aliasing by John Hogg, Doug Lea, Alan Wills, Dennis de Champeaux and Richard Holt. The book also includes a much anticipated survey on Ownership Types, and a tutorial on the VeriFast verification tool. Other topics covered include separation logic, universe types, immutability, alias analysis and concurrency. The book finishes off with a number of visions for the future.
 

B-CCENTRE IPv6 Principles & Forensics Training

18/03/2013 The B-CCENTRE organised another two-day training in IPv6 on 21 and 22 February 2013, a co-operation between DistriNet - KU Leuven, the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU) of the Belgian Federal police and Cisco Systems. 18 experts from Belgian Law Enforcement, as well as one expert from the Spanish Guardia Civil, the Irish 2CENTRE and the recently established European Cybercrime Centre at Europol (EC3) participated in this IPv6 Principles & Forensics training at the Campus of the Department of Computer Science, DistriNet@KU Leuven.
 

The Cookieless monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-based Device Fingerprinting

08/03/2013 In 1994, Lou Montulli, while working for Netscape Communications, introduced the idea of cookies in the context of a web browser. The cookie mechanism allows a web server to store a small amount of data on the computers of visiting users, which is then sent back to the web server upon subsequent requests. Using this mechanism, a web site can build and maintain state over the otherwise stateless HTTP protocol. Cookies were quickly embraced by browser vendors and web developers. Today, they are one of the core technologies on which complex, stateful web applications are built.
 

European Commission supports research on Cyber security

29/11/2012 The Digital agenda of the EC stresses the importance of the development and implementation of innovative technologies aiming at increasing trust and security in the cyberworld. The European Commission is developing wider cybersecurity strategies for Europe and thus allocating significantly more money to develop innovative technologies to improve cybersecurity. In the same memo the EC focuses on a number of EU-funded research projects adressing major cybersecurity issues among which NESSOS and Secure Change, two projects that focus on 'security by design' and in which the DistriNet research group is actively involved.
 

Successful online anti-fraud app CsFire now also available on Google Chrome

08/11/2012 CsFire is an online fraud app developed by the iMinds - KU Leuven Security Department, preventing so-called Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. It currently has about 3.500 daily users on Mozilla Firefox and has been downloaded about 50.000 times worldwide. The successful app now becomes available through the Google Web Store as a free extension as well.
 

Learn the basics of serverside web-security, play the wargame developed by Steven Van Acker!

05/11/2012 In association with the FP7 network of excellence NESSoS, Steven Van Acker has developed a hacker wargame called Natas. Only one week after the launch of the wargame on the information security training site Overthewire.org, Natas has already been played by over 4.500 people.
 

DiY Smart Experiences shows the potential of the Internet of Things

31/10/2012 The project 'Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences' received the SILVER Achievement Award 2012. The jury highlighted the 'huge quantity of practical results, including security of the Contiki sensor OS, a semantic layer to describe the sensors and ensure interoperability, and the underlying distributed architecture.' The ITEA 2 Board presents these annual achievement awards for high-level technical contributions based on true European collaboration that provide significant results.
 

Job Noorman wins the last edition of the Jos Schepens Award

27/10/2012 On Saturday October 27, 2012 the last award presentation of the Jos Schepens Memorial Fund will take place. During this presentation Job Noorman will receive the annual Jos Schepens Award for his master thesis on countermeasures against control-flow hijacking attacks.
 

Three DistriNet papers presented at the annual conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

16/10/2012 In this year's conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), one of the top international security conferences, DistriNet was proud to have three different papers submitted and accepted. Willem De Groef, Nick Nikiforakis and Raoul Strackx were there to present their work.
 

IPv6 Pilot Training

17/09/2012 IBBT-DistriNet organised the first B-CCENTRE training on 13 and 14 September 2012. 15 experts from the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU) and from Regional Computer Crime Units (RCCU) were joined by experts from four financial institutions for a two days training on IPv6 Basics and Forensics. It was a Pilot Training, test-bedding the course material and teaching methodology on the selected group of participants. Trainers were experts from the research group DistriNet, from CISCO and from the FCCU, joining knowledge from research, industry, and law enforcement.
 

DistriNet team wins Formal Methods 2012 verification competition

30/08/2012 On August 30, prof. Bart Jacobs and Dr. Jan Smans from DistriNet's VeriFast program verification research team participated with their VeriFast tool in the VerifyThis program verification competition colocated with the Formal Methods 2012 conference in Paris. Eleven teams were given about 4 hours to verify the correctness of three programs.
 

Tom Reynaert receives Alcatel Lucent Thesis award 2012

12/07/2012 Tom Reynaert won the Alcatel-Lucent Thesis Award 2012 for his Master Thesis titled "Enhanced Privacy in Social Application Platforms". The promotors of his thesis are Prof. Frank Piessens and Dr. Lieven Desmet. Jos van Sas, director external affairs Bell Labs handed out the award.
 

Eddy Truyen and Stefan Walraven win Best Paper Award at SAC 2012

30/03/2012 At the 27th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2012), Eddy Truyen and Stefan Walraven received the Best Paper Award for the paper entitled "Context-Oriented Programming for Customizable SaaS Applications".
 

Pieter Agten receives Alcatel Lucent Bell MSc Thesis award

18/10/2011 Pieter Agten was awarded the Alcatel-Lucent Bell MSc Thesis Award 2011 for his Master Thesis titled "Traffic monitoring and rate limiting in wireless sensor networks". The promotor of his thesis is Prof. Wouter Joosen, Head of the DistriNet Research Group.
 

Presentation Variability in the Cloud by Koen Handekyn at IMinds 2011

13/10/2011

 

Presentation iMinds Security Department by Prof. Wouter Joosen at IMinds 2011

13/10/2011

 

The impact of new ICT trends on the security of company networks

25/09/2011 Telenet publishes a report on the security of computers and computer networks. One of the experts interviewed is Prof. Christophe Huygens of the DistriNet Research Group. He talks about the latest trends in the use of ICT, like mobile communication and the Internet of Things, and how these trends impact the security of company networks.
 

DistriNet analyses the security of next generation web standards for ENISA

31/08/2011 The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) commissioned DistriNet to make a security analysis of the 13 W3C-stardards. The report: 'A Security analysis of next generation web standards' resulted in the identification and detailed description of in total 51 security threats and issues.

 

Bram Bonné was awarded the Luciad Master Thesis price 2011

15/07/2011 Bram Bonné was awarded the Luciad Master Thesis price 2011 for his master thesis titled "Improving session security in web applications". Bram received this award from the business representatives during the official proclamation of the Faculty of Engineering on July 8, 2011. For Luciad, the prize was handed out by Frank Suykens, head of product development at Luciad.
 

Best Paper award for three Distrinet members at Formal Methods 2011

28/06/2011 The paper "The 1st Verified Software Competition: Experience Report." co-authored by three Distrinet members (Bart Jacobs, Jan Smans and Frank Piessens) has won the best paper award at FM 2011, a top research conference on applications of formal methods in software engineering.
 

Launch of the Belgian Cybercrime Centre of Excellence for Research, Training & Education

30/05/2011 Brussels, May 27 2011. The Belgian Cybercrime Centre of Excellence for Training, Research and Education, in short b-ccentre, was officially inaugurated by Minister Stefaan De Clerck, Minister Annemie Turtelboom and Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne. The b-ccentre is established by KU Leuven, together with other academic institutions and partners from the public and private sector and will be a platform for the exchange of knowledge, expertise and training in the field of cybercrime. Within the b-ccentre the research groups DistriNet and COSIC will focus on cybercrime research and education from a technical point-of-view.
 

iMinds - DistriNet Researchers Expose the Lack of Privacy in File Hosting Services

09/05/2011 May 8, 2011. Together with their fellow researchers of the Eurecom Institute in France, Nick Nikiforakis, Steven Van Acker and Wouter Joosen of the DistriNet Research Group attract a great deal of interest on 'The Register' and on 'Slashdot' with their USENIX paper entitled "Exposing the Lack of Privacy in File Hosting Services".
 

DSP Valley newsletter highlights OptiMMA showcase at DATE.

04/05/2011 At the recent conference Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), the OptiMMA project was presented during three 2-hour slots at the university booth on the exhibition floor. The OptiMMA project (Optimization of MP-SoC Middleware for event-driven dynamic Applications) is an IWT SBOproject and a collaboration of imec, Ghent University, KU Leuven - DistriNet, University of Antwerp and V.U.B.
 

SONY PlayStation Network down for over a week due to hackers

27/04/2011 The PlayStation Network (PSN) of SONY enables gamers worldwide with a PlayStation3 console to go online and play multiplayer games over the Internet. However, since April 20th 2011 the PSN has been brought down due to a security breach, impacting over 70 million of gamers worldwide. To date, it is unknown when the PlayStation Network will be operational again, but an additional downtime of at least 1 week is expected. In addition, sensitive personal data (such as passwords, dates of birth) of over 70 million PSN users has been stolen, possibly including credit card information.
 

DistriNet teams conquer second and fourth place in the Battle of Talents

05/04/2011 Monday March 21st, two DistriNet teams secured their place in the final top four of the Battle of Talents, an online competition to discover Flanders? best entrepreneurial talents. In this virtual competition emerging business ideas from students and researchers of Flemish universities and higher educational institutions were elaborated and challenged by students of leading business schools.
 

Davy Preuveneers wins Best Paper Award at MobiQuitous 2010

20/12/2010 At the International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems Davy Preuveneers receives Best Paper Award for his paper "uC-SemPS: Energy-efficient semantic publish/subscribe for battery-powered systems".
 

DistriNet student receives Alcatel-Lucent Innovation Award for his Master Thesis

15/11/2010 Gent, October 25, 2010. Alcatel-Lucent Belgium organized its annual innovation awards contest to reward students who show exceptional achievements in their field and are an inspiration to others.
 

ITEA Exhibition Award for DIY Smart Experience

29/10/2010 Gent, October 27, 2010. During the closing event of the ITEA2-Artemis Co-Summit the DiY Smart Experience project was selected by the participants for the ITEA Exhibition Award 2010.
 

Maarten Decat wins Jos Schepens Award

09/10/2010 Maarten Decat receives the annual Jos Schepens Award for his master thesis on building secure web applications.
 

Bart Jacobs appointed Professor

01/10/2010 Bart Jacobs, one of DistriNets' key senior researchers, is appointed professor at the KU Leuven Departement of Computer Science starting October 1st, 2010. DistriNet wishes him a successful 'kickoff' and warmly welcomes him as new faculty member.
 

Interview Pierre Verbaeten over dns.be

28/06/2010 video
 

Interview of Pierre Verbaeten as chairman of the EURid Board of Directors

22/06/2010 video
 

New revolutionary platform for mobile software

22/06/2010 MUSIC, acronym of Self-Adapting Applications for Mobile USers In Ubiquitous Computing Environments, is an open source platform for the development and execution of self-adapting, reconfigurable mobile applications which are dynamically adapted to the user and execution context.
 

Zubair Wadood wins Best Paper Award at IEEE ICC MAN 2010

27/05/2010 The paper "A Body-Coupled Communication and Radio Frequency Dual Technology Cooperation Protocol for Body-Area Networks" by Steven Corroy, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, Antonios Argyriou, University of Thessaly, Greece, Zubair Wadood, KU Leuven, Belgium and Heribert Baldus, Philips Research Europe, Germany was selected for the Best Paper Award at the Second International Workshop on Medical Applications Networking (MAN 2010).
 

20 kaarsjes .be

27/04/2010 Als u een mailtje wil sturen, hoeft u er zich niet om te bekommeren langs welke weg dat moet gebeuren.
 

Wouter De Borger wins 'Most Innovative Student Work' Award at AOSD.10

20/04/2010 Wouter De Borger received the 'Most innovative student work' award at the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development for his PhD research proposal "Life-cycle support for Passive and Reactive Monitoring":
 

Strong DistriNet presence at AOSD.10

20/04/2010 At the AOSD 2010 conference in Rennes and St. Malo, France, the DistriNet research group was well represented with three accepted papers.
 

Best Student Paper Award for Bart Vanbrabant

10/11/2009 Bart Vanbrabant was awarded the best Student Paper Award from LISA, the Large installation system administration conference for his paper: Federated access control and workflow enforcement in systems configuration
 

Philippe De Ryck wins Jos Schepens Award

10/10/2009 Philippe De Ryck and Erik Debie were awarded the Jos Schepens Award for their Master Thesis titled "Non-repudiation Middleware for Web-based Architectures".
 

Dubbele slash was niet nodig

16/09/2009 'Sorry voor het tijdverlies', zegt de oprichter van het internet. 'Http:// had even goed gewerkt zonder die twee strepen.'
 

ECRYPT'09 best paper award for Kristof Verslype

14/07/2009 Kristof Verslype was awarded the best paper award from SECRYPT, the international conference on security and cryptography for his paper: Service and Timeframe Dependent Unlinkable One-Time Pseudonyms.
 

Third place in Cipher 5 CTF for the DistriNet team

13/07/2009 On July 9th 2009, a team of 7 DistriNet researchers scored highly in the Cipher 5 CFT. The team, also known as the Electronic Mayhem, ended as third-place winner out of 33 participants.
 

Open Academic Position in Network Software and Middleware

29/05/2009 The Department of Computer Science invites applications for a full-time tenured academic position in Network software and Middleware. We are looking for a dynamic and motivated individual (m/f) with an excellent research record, who is able to teach courses on computer networks.
 

Best Paper Award for Koen Buyens

09/04/2009 Koen Buyens was awarded the 'Best Paper Award' (pdf) from ARES, the International Conference on Availability, Security and Reliability.
 

.be viert twintigste verjaardag

02/03/2009 En net tien jaar geleden werd DNS opgericht, de huidige beheerder van de .be-domeinnaam.
 

Most Influential Paper Award for Dave Clarke

20/01/2009 OOPSLA, Nashville, Tennessee, October 2008. Together with John Potter and James Noble, Dave Clarke was awarded the 'Most Influential Paper Award' from OOPSLA, the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. Since 2006 this award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at OOPSLA 10 years ago. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.
 

Silver ITEA Achievement Award for MARTES

30/10/2008 The Silver ITEA achievement award went to MARTES (Model-based Approach to Real-Time Embedded Systems development) , which developed model-based methodology addressing business risks, new systems domains and increasing complexity to boost productivity of embedded-systems development.
 

Gold and Silver ITEA Awards for LOMS

30/10/2008 The project 'Local Mobile Services' ( LOMS ) received the GOLD Achievement Award 2008. LOMS was selected as 'best project' out of ten projects that closed this year. The ITEA 2 Board presents these annual awards for high-level technical contributions based on true European collaboration that provide significant results.
 

Internet of Things komt dichterbij

29/10/2008 Het Internet of Things (IoT) komt dichterbij. Het IoT wil zowat alle objecten op de wereld met elkaar in verbinding brengen om informatie uit te wisselen. De toepassingen in dat netwerk zouden ons dagelijkse leven ingrijpend kunnen veranderen, nog veel meer dan de groei van het Internet. De hardware voor het IoT is alvast in volle ontwikkeling en er bestaan al enkele toepassingen in de logistiek en de medische wereld. Maar dat is slechts een eerste aanzet want deze applicaties werken in goed controleerbare omgevingen. Echte IoT-toepassingen opereren in een onvoorspelbare en onoverzichtelijke wereld van slimme objecten. Daarom moet niet alleen de hardware maar vooral de software nog grondig vernieuwen.
 

DistriNet welcomes Dave Clarke

29/09/2008 We are proud to welcome Dave Clarke as a new Faculty member of our research group, starting October 1st 2008.
 

Sam Michiels acquires Industrial Research Fellowship for DistriNet

23/09/2008 The IOF Council of the KU Leuven has granted Sam Michiels an Industrial Research fellowship; Wouter Joosen is promotor. Sam's new mandate will enable him to focus on research, innovation and especially valorization in the domain of managing large-scale distributed software systems.
 

DistriNet wins international security competition

06/09/2008 A team of 6 researchers from DistriNet, the security research group of the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven won an international Capture-the-flag competition on Saturday, September 6th. The competition, which focused on software security, was organized by the Technical University of Darmstadt. Seventeen university teams from North America, Asia and Europe spent six hours launching a volley of attacks at each other and applying state-of-the-art defensive techniques.
 

UIC'08 Best Paper Award for Davy Preuveneers

25/06/2008 The UIC'08 Best Paper Award was presented to Davy Preuveneers for his paper on "Pervasive Services on the Move: Smart Service Diffusion on the OSGi Framework".
 

Education leaders unite: DistriNet and SANS to cooperate on security education

14/05/2008 DistriNet, the security research group of the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven today announced an exciting new partnership with SANS Software Security Institute (SANS-SSI), a cooperative research and education organization in computer security training. The goal of the partnership is to enhance the security curriculum of students by including secure coding in computing and engineering courses, to exchange teaching practices in the field of secure programming, and to provide easy access for European companies to SANS-SSI knowledge and certification.
 

Pierre Verbaeten: éminance grise of the internet

14/03/2008 Hij is 63 en geldt een beetje als de éminence grise van het Belgische internet. Professor Pierre Verbaeten beheerde jarenlang de .be domeinnamen. Hij kon iemand op het internet weigeren of toestaan, en hield er strak de hand aan. "Men noemde mij de keizer van het net", verklaarde hij, "of zelfs de virtuele paus".
 

Extreme makeover: home page edition

26/02/2008 Under the supervision of Wouter Joosen a small webteam designed a complete new DistriNet web site wich aims at being well-designed, user-friendly and informative.
 

LISA '07 Best Paper Award for Thomas Delaet for his paper on PoDIM

06/02/2008 The high rate of requirement changes make system administration a complex task. This complexity is further influenced by the increasing scale, unpredictable behaviour of software and diversity in terms of hardware and software.
 

Silver ITEA achievement award for AGILE

08/11/2007 Barco?s avionics division has been awarded a 2007 Silver ITEA Achievement Award for its contribution to the AGILE software engineering project. The AGILE project, which involves partners from Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and The Netherlands, set out to prove that the application of agile processes speeds up embedded software development and boosts quality. During extensive trials with more than 1800 engineers and managers in 68 industrial pilot projects, AGILE demonstrated up to 70% reductions in total R&D lead time and costs.
 

Emiritus Prof. Y.Willems

11/10/2007 Emiritus Prof. Y.Willems
 

Three new FWO research mandates for DistriNet

22/06/2007 Three new FWO research mandates for DistriNet
 

Ubizen merges into Verizon

14/05/2007 Cybertrust is de groep die in 2005 na een incidentrijke biedoorlog Ubizen overnam. Ubizen had nog op 2 april laatstleden zijn naam veranderd in Cybertrust Belgium. Een nieuwe naamsverandering zit er dus al aan te komen.
 

DistriNet wins third place in international 'Capture-The-Flag' contest

08/05/2007 This year the internationale hacker-contest 'Capture-The-Flag' was organised by the University of South Florida. A team of 10 DistriNet researchers came through the battle with honour and won a third place on the podium. During 12 hours 20 academic teams from accross the world competed with each other in this ICT security contest.
 

Lieven Desmet briefly comments on the Folding@home experiment of Stanford University

27/03/2007 video
 

The Francqui Foundation attributes a Belgian Francqui Chair on the subject Software Security to Prof. Frank Piessens

01/02/2007 The Institut d'Informatique is pleased to announce that the Francqui Foundation has attributed a Belgian Francqui Chair on the subject Software Security to Prof. Frank Piessens. The lecture series will take place during spring 2007.
 

Interview with Stijn Bijnens - Ubizen

20/12/2006 ,,Het moest ons altijd als eerste overkomen''
 

Looking for a Newspaper experience on New Paper

24/11/2006 In the context of the ePpaper project, the DistriNet research group of the KU Leuven has realized a study that investigates how to extend the software platform of the publisher in order to facilitate management of digital usage rights.
 

DistriNet wins 6th place in international ICT security contest Cipher2

01/06/2006 Een team van beveiligingsspecialisten van de KU Leuven neemt deel aan een hacker-wedstrijd.
 

The managers of the Net

26/10/2005 De onbetwiste keizer van het internet bestaat niet, maar ook de macht van de individuele surfer is niets meer dan een lang vervlogen mythe.
 

The Department of Computer Science of the KU Leuven invites Prof. Piet Demeester to hold the Francqui Chair 2005-2006

01/09/2005

 

".eu", waiting for the sunrise

01/11/2004 Signed in Brussels the agreement to operate the new EU Internet domain: "Registrations for businesses, organisations and citizens open by next year"
 

Stop the presses! Roll out the e-papers - DIGINEWS

31/03/2004 Newspapers are driven by technology, from news gathering to typesetting and printing, yet the traditional, offline version appears to defy the digital age. At root, physical newspapers are, as they have always been, ink on lightweight paper.
 

Interview with Lieven Desmet on Radio 1

13/11/2003 Jongens en Wetenschap - audio
 

EURid consortium chosen to run the .eu TLD

22/05/2003 EURid consortium chosen to run the .eu TLD
 

Official opening of the Sun Center of Excellence 'Component oriented development for highly adaptable systems'

22/05/2003 Rector André Oosterlinck opent nu donderdag 22 mei officieel het Sun Center of Excellence ?Component oriented development for highly adaptable systems? aan het departement Computerwetenschappen van de K.U.Leuven. De producent van computer hard- en software zal in het Center of Excellence academisch onderzoek ondersteunen.
 

One of the oldest ".be" name servers is being taken out of production today

24/04/2003

 

Ubizen concentrates on services

10/01/2003 Het in 1995 uit de universiteit Leuven voortgekomen Ubizen verkleint zijn belang in de Europese distributeur van netwerkproducten Risc Technologies aanzienlijk. Met de verkoop van de aandelen versterkt het bedrijf zijn kaspositie. Daarnaast concentreert het zich verder op zijn hoofdactiviteit: netwerkbeveiligingsdiensten leveren.
 

PEPiTA wins the 2002 ITEA Achievement Award

10/10/2002 Information Technology for European Advancement ? ITEA ? is Europe?s premier cooperative programme for pre-competitive R&D, aiming at strengthening European industry by establishing leadership in embedded and distributed software.
 

Gemma Frisius 2 invests in QMedit

30/07/2002 Gemma Frisius II, a new investment fund created by Fortis, the Dutch-Belgian banking combine, KBC and the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and aimed at funding the university?s new spin-off initiatives, said it had invested ? 750.000 in Qmedit, the recent merger of Bico and Emedit -both KUL spin-offs-, which focuses on the development of workflow software for the healthcare driven by clinical pathways.
 

Interview with Frank Piessens on Radio 1

26/03/2002 Jongens en Wetenschap - audio
 

Formation of L-Sec: Leuven Security Excellence Consortium

01/01/2002 L-SEC, of Leuven Security Excellence Consortium, werd opgericht in januari van dit jaar. Het is een samenwerkingsverband tussen een aantal onderzoeksgroepen van de K.U.Leuven en een reeks bedrijven die zich specialiseren in e-security, dus zowat alles wat met de bescherming van dataverkeer te maken heeft. We spraken met een aantal specialisten van de K.U.Leuven, die via hun onderzoekseenheid bij de nieuwe vzw betrokken zijn.