distributed computer systems

Organization

Course Overview

This course gives an introduction to secure communication in computer networks. Topics covered in this lecture include:

• history of secure communication
• symmetric cryptography: DES, 3DES, AES
• asymmetric cryptography: RSA, Diffie-Hellman, El Gamal
• hash functions: MD5, SHA1, SHA2, SHA3
• cryptographic protocols: Secret Sharing, Needham-Schroeder, Kerberos, X.509
• other security relevant topics: random number generation, birthday problem

Material/Literature

• The nice and comprehensive Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes, van Oorschot and Vanstone is available online for free and can be found here.
• An extra course about cryptography can be found here.
• A illustrative video about the discrete logarithm problem.
• ECC Visualization (java)
• An example of differential Cryptanalysis can be found here.
• An example of a MD5-collistion with two images can be found here.

Organisation

Course Overview

This course covers aspects and principles of network security. Based on many attacks on common technologies used in communication systems, this course illustrates how things can go wrong and provides basic measures to protect a network from mistakes committed in the past. It covers furthermore the fundamental concepts of security and security problems.

Areas covered in this lecture:

• Physical and Link Layer Security
• Network Layer Security
• Transport Layer Security
• Application Layer Security

Please note that it is strongly recommended to attend communication systems first since it provides the background knowledge for this lecture.

Registration & Organization

The lecture is organized via OLAT. To register for the lecture an get access to the material, please proceed to this link:

https://olat.vcrp.de/url/RepositoryEntry/3392342247

You will have to register in order to receive the links to the live lecture, updates and to get access to material (slides).

Contents

This workshop is a (mandatory!) part of the Network Security lecture held in the winter term 2020/2021. Subject of the workshop are all topics covered in the first chapter "Physical- & Link-Layer Security":

• Jamming: Attacks, Detection, Mitigation
• WiFi (IEEE 802.11): Problems, Attacks, State-of-the-art
• Cellular networks: GSM, LTE
• Cyber-physical Systems: PKES, ADS-B
• Countermeasures: Secure Location Verification, Distance Bounding

Organisation

The workshop is organised in a typical computer science research conference manner. It consists of three phases, each associated with a deadline that is provided further below:

1. Submission phase: Students submit their contributions (here: in the form of essays) to the workshop. Each essay must be written by a group of three students. Therefore, you need to find two peers for your group. In case you do not know any other attendees, you will have the opportunity to find a group in the lecture. Please read the submission guidelines (below) carefully!
2. Review phase: After the submission deadline has passed, all submissions will be reviewed and rated by members of the program committee. For this workshop, the program committee consists of all authors, that is, you. This means, that you have to read, comment, and rate three essays from other students. The submission and reviewing process is double-blind, which means that neither the authors know the reviewers, nor do the reviewers know the authors.
3. Revision phase: Once the deadline for reviews has passed, we hand out the (anonymous) reviews to the authors of the essays. The authors will then have to revise their essay based on the comments of the reviewers. After processing the reviews and updating the essays, the groups have to re-submit their works and the reviewers have to adjust their ratings.

After the third phase, we will take the best essays (according to their ratings) and publish them on the lecture's website in form of a workshop proceedings. As already mentioned in the lecture, successful participation in this workshop (including all three phases) is mandatory and a formal prerequisite of the exam. Successful participation means that the final rating of your essay must be above 0,5 (on a Likert scale) and it must comply with these guidelines.

Deadlines

Note: These deadlines are hard deadlines! Missing them results in an immediate exclusion from the workshop and loss of admission. So make sure you are well-organised.

Submission Guidelines

In order to be accepted for the review process, your essay must strictly conform with the following regulations. Violations will result in exclusion from the workshop and thus, exclusion from the NetSec exam. So please read the following instructions carefully and make sure your essay complies with the submission guidelines.

• The number of authors is limited to at most three authors per essay. We prefer groups of three, however, smaller groups are possible under special circumstances. Organisation of group members and group-internal division of work is at your own responsibility. If you do not find any group mates, just send This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. an email.
• The essays will be reviewed in double-blind mode. They must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. Contact the program chair This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you have any questions. Papers that are not properly anonymised may be rejected without review. Please note that only the essay itself, not the registration at easychair (see below) must be anonymised. Since students from other groups may be your reviewer in the review process, it is strongly recommended not to reveal your topic other groups or students outside the lecture to obtain unbiased reviews.
• The length of the essay must be at least 2 pages per author and at least 3 pages in total. So if you plan to write your essay alone, you will have to write more. Your essay should consist of at least 66% text. That means that figures and tables combined should not occupy more than 1/3rd of the available space.
• Essays must be written using the LaTeX markup language. Knowing LaTeX is a key skill in the academic world. If you are not familiar with LaTeX yet, there is plenty of documentation and examples available online. As common for international research conferences, essays must be formatted for US letter (not A4) size paper. The text must be formatted in a two-column layout, with columns no more than 9.5 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide. The text must be in Times font, 10-point, with 11-point or 12-point line spacing. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the IEEE conference proceedings templates. Its default settings when using \documentclass[10pt, conference, letterpaper]{IEEEtran} are accepted.
• Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader 9 and when printed in black and white.
• We expect every student to use at least 2 references. Use the bibliography of the NetSec slides (last set of slides) or search engines like Google Scholar to find literature on your topic. That means, if you are writing your essay in a group of three students, your essay should list at least 6 references. Use e.g. BibTeX for referencing.
• Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct. If you refer to information from other sources directly or indirectly, indicate the original source carefully using references. We will use plagiarism detection tools, so make sure you do not copy without referencing the source. For referencing and bibliography examples, please check e.g. the papers referenced in the NetSec lecture. It is again strongly recommended to use the IEEE bibliography style as shown here. This style is common for computer science papers. If you are not sure what counts as plagiarism, there is plenty material on the internet, e.g., this article.
• Essays must be submitted at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=phylisec20 and may be updated at any time until the submission deadline (see above). On registration, EasyChair requires you to enter your home address. If you feel uncomfortable with providing your data to EasyChair (t is a fairly reputable platform), just use the address of TU Kaiserslautern instead of your private one.
• Fairness: In case one of your group mates does not deliver her/his part of the essay, do not hesitate to omit the name when registering the essay on the submission platform. To keep this exercise fair, you do not have to do the work for lazy group mates. Work should be evenly distributed to all group members. For instance, if only two of the three group members are actually doing the work, enter only these two names on EasyChair. Also the required number of pages is then reduced accordingly to 4 (or 3 if only one is doing all the work).

Review Guidelines

After you've successfully submitted your essay, it's time to start the reviewing phase of the workshop. Therefore, you will be added to the so called "Program Committee" on Easychair and Yasmina will assign two essays to everyone of you. If you have no EasyChair account yet, make sure you register using the same email address your group mate entered for your submission. The reviews will be double-blind. This means that neither you know who you are reviewing, nor the other authors will know who reviewed them.

Start with reading the essays assigned to you carefully and then fill in the review form in EasyChair for each essay. You will find the essays assigned to you under "Reviews->Assigned to me". To submit a review, click on the "+"-Button and enter your review into the form. Each section in the review (summary/strengths/weaknesses) should have around 100 words. Be concise and provide constructive arguments for your statements. The reviews will serve as a basis for improvements in the revision phase and all reviewers should keep this in mind. Finally, rate the essay between very bad (-2) and very good (2). Based on this final rating, we will make our final decision about whether you'll have to improve your essay in the revision phase or not in order to pass this workshop.

Plagiarism: Please also check for plagiarism (see instructions above). In case you learn that the essay you are reviewing is a case of plagiarism, we recommend to reject the paper by rating it with -2. In such a case, please provide proof for your allegation by referencing the respective parts of the essay. Examples for plagiarism would be if the essay is almost completely copied from other works or if content of other works is used without properly referencing the original source.

Misc: If you have any additional comments you would like us to know (but not the authors), use the comments field in the submission form.

Contents

This workshop is a (mandatory!) part of the Network Security lecture held in the winter term 2021/2022. Subject of the workshop are all topics covered in the first chapter "Physical- & Link-Layer Security":

• Jamming: Attacks, Detection, Mitigation
• WiFi (IEEE 802.11): Problems, Attacks, State-of-the-art
• Bluetooth Low Energy
• Cellular networks: GSM, LTE
• Cyber-physical Systems: PKES, ADS-B
• Countermeasures: Secure Location Verification, Distance Bounding

Organisation

The workshop is organised in a typical computer science research conference manner. It consists of three phases, each associated with a deadline that is provided further below:

1. Submission phase: Students submit their contributions (here: in the form of essays) to the workshop. Each essay must be written by a group of three students. Therefore, you need to find two peers for your group. In case you do not know any other attendees, you will have the opportunity to find a group in the lecture. Please read the submission guidelines (below) carefully!
2. Review phase: After the submission deadline has passed, all submissions will be reviewed and rated by members of the program committee. For this workshop, the program committee consists of all authors, that is, you. This means, that you have to read, comment, and rate three essays from other students. The submission and reviewing process is double-blind, which means that neither the authors know the reviewers, nor do the reviewers know the authors.
3. Revision phase: Once the deadline for reviews has passed, we hand out the (anonymous) reviews to the authors of the essays. The authors will then have to revise their essay based on the comments of the reviewers. After processing the reviews and updating the essays, the groups have to re-submit their works and the reviewers have to adjust their ratings.

After the third phase, we will take the best essays (according to their ratings) and publish them on the lecture's website in form of a workshop proceedings. As already mentioned in the lecture, successful participation in this workshop (including all three phases) is mandatory and a formal prerequisite of the exam. Successful participation means that the final rating of your essay must be above 0,5 (on a Likert scale) and it must comply with these guidelines.

Deadlines

Note: These deadlines are hard deadlines! Missing them results in an immediate exclusion from the workshop and loss of admission. So make sure you are well-organised.

Submission Guidelines

In order to be accepted for the review process, your essay must strictly conform with the following regulations. Violations will result in exclusion from the workshop and thus, exclusion from the NetSec exam. So please read the following instructions carefully and make sure your essay complies with the submission guidelines.

• The number of authors is limited to at most three authors per essay. We prefer groups of three, however, smaller groups are possible under special circumstances. Organisation of group members and group-internal division of work is at your own responsibility. If you do not find any group mates, just send This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. an email.
• The essays will be reviewed in double-blind mode. They must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. Contact the program chair This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you have any questions. Papers that are not properly anonymised may be rejected without review. Please note that only the essay itself, not the registration at easychair (see below) must be anonymised. Since students from other groups may be your reviewer in the review process, it is strongly recommended not to reveal your topic other groups or students outside the lecture to obtain unbiased reviews.
• The length of the essay must be at least 2 pages per author and at least 3 pages in total. So if you plan to write your essay alone, you will have to write more. Your essay should consist of at least 66% text. That means that figures and tables combined should not occupy more than 1/3rd of the available space.
• Essays must be written using the LaTeX markup language. Knowing LaTeX is a key skill in the academic world. If you are not familiar with LaTeX yet, there is plenty of documentation and examples available online. As common for international research conferences, essays must be formatted for US letter (not A4) size paper. The text must be formatted in a two-column layout, with columns no more than 9.5 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide. The text must be in Times font, 10-point, with 11-point or 12-point line spacing. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the IEEE conference proceedings templates. Its default settings when using \documentclass[10pt, conference, letterpaper]{IEEEtran} are accepted.
• Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader 9 and when printed in black and white.
• We expect every student to use at least 2 references. Use the bibliography of the NetSec slides (last set of slides) or search engines like Google Scholar to find literature on your topic. That means, if you are writing your essay in a group of three students, your essay should list at least 6 references. Use e.g. BibTeX for referencing.
• Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct. If you refer to information from other sources directly or indirectly, indicate the original source carefully using references. We will use plagiarism detection tools, so make sure you do not copy without referencing the source. For referencing and bibliography examples, please check e.g. the papers referenced in the NetSec lecture. It is again strongly recommended to use the IEEE bibliography style as shown here. This style is common for computer science papers. If you are not sure what counts as plagiarism, there is plenty material on the internet, e.g., this article.
• Essays must be submitted at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=phylisec21 and may be updated at any time until the submission deadline (see above). On registration, EasyChair requires you to enter your home address. If you feel uncomfortable with providing your data to EasyChair (t is a fairly reputable platform), just use the address of TU Kaiserslautern instead of your private one.
• Fairness: In case one of your group mates does not deliver her/his part of the essay, do not hesitate to omit the name when registering the essay on the submission platform. To keep this exercise fair, you do not have to do the work for lazy group mates. Work should be evenly distributed to all group members. For instance, if only two of the three group members are actually doing the work, enter only these two names on EasyChair. Also the required number of pages is then reduced accordingly to 4 (or 3 if only one is doing all the work).

Review Guidelines

After you've successfully submitted your essay, it's time to start the reviewing phase of the workshop. Therefore, you will be added to the so called "Program Committee" on Easychair and Yasmina will assign two essays to everyone of you. If you have no EasyChair account yet, make sure you register using the same email address your group mate entered for your submission. The reviews will be double-blind. This means that neither you know who you are reviewing, nor the other authors will know who reviewed them.

Start with reading the essays assigned to you carefully and then fill in the review form in EasyChair for each essay. You will find the essays assigned to you under "Reviews->Assigned to me". To submit a review, click on the "+"-Button and enter your review into the form. Each section in the review (summary/strengths/weaknesses) should have around 100 words. Be concise and provide constructive arguments for your statements. The reviews will serve as a basis for improvements in the revision phase and all reviewers should keep this in mind. Finally, rate the essay between very bad (-2) and very good (2). Based on this final rating, we will make our final decision about whether you'll have to improve your essay in the revision phase or not in order to pass this workshop.

Plagiarism: Please also check for plagiarism (see instructions above). In case you learn that the essay you are reviewing is a case of plagiarism, we recommend to reject the paper by rating it with -2. In such a case, please provide proof for your allegation by referencing the respective parts of the essay. Examples for plagiarism would be if the essay is almost completely copied from other works or if content of other works is used without properly referencing the original source.

Misc: If you have any additional comments you would like us to know (but not the authors), use the comments field in the submission form.