Welcome to the Dependable Computing Systems Research Group! We are a team of experts dedicated to advancing the field of dependable computing. We focus on developing reliable and trustworthy computing systems that can withstand failures and provide robust, uninterrupted service. Our research spans various areas, including fault tolerance, system reliability, and security, to tackle the challenges posed by the increasing complexity and interconnectivity of modern computing systems.
Our group comprises experienced researchers and talented students driven by a passion for advancing the field. We collaborate with leading academic and industry partners to bring cutting-edge solutions to real-world problems. Whether you're a fellow researcher, student, or industry professional, we invite you to join us on our journey toward building a more dependable and secure computing future.
Our research
With a focus on low-level security features, we explore hardware vulnerabilities that can affect devices in the field, be they on the ground or in space. While encryption standards might be theoretically secure, their implementations might leak information or provide easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities. Our group explores these vulnerabilities found on commercial devices and proposes countermeasures that can be implemented both in software and hardware (full stack). Our investigations cover:
- Side-Channel Analysis and attacks
- Fault Injection campaigns
- Development and investigation of Roots-of-Trust
- Hardware security primitives
- Secure IPs and accelerators
Space, automotive, and medical devices are safety-critical systems, where it is necessary to provide guarantees to the availability and reliability of the system and service. As technology has improved, we've been able to fit more and more hardware onto each computer chip. Smaller technology nodes make them more vulnerable to defects and Single Event Upsets (SEUs) from ionizing particles. We investigate reliability techniques, that can provide these assurances, our efforts include:
- Characterization of devices under ionizing radiation exposure
- Implementation of hardware and software reliability schemes
- Development of reliable IPs and accelerators
The DCS group works with many partners, from the private and public sectors, in industry and academia. This research leads us to projects and topics that align with state-of-the-art research for space reliability and the security domain. Some of our partners include:
Who we are
Our Students
These are the current thesis from our students. To find the currently available thesis, look at the bottom of this page.
- Fault Injection attacks for Trusted Execution Environments in RISC-V, Remco van Dijk
- Optimizing hashes in FPGAs for probabilistic data structures, Frank G. W. Kok
- Lightweight implementation of RERI standard for RISC-V, Michiel Koenderink
- Efficient implementation of reliable Mondrian Forest at the Edge, Ewout van Nimwegen
- Implementation of a compiler for CIM in racetrack memory, Larissa van Deinse
- Fast and statistical emulation based fault injection, Kevin Schrama
- SCA analysis of PQC implementations in RISC-V systems, Jasper T. Vinkenvleugel
These are the current thesis from our students. To find the currently available thesis, look at the bottom of this page.
- Evaluation of NeoRV performance on SF2 using all the available memory resources on the board, Tycho Schurink
Our Alumni have finished their projects and are now making the world a safer and more secure place. Find their work here:
2024
2023
- Design and evaluation of a Ring Oscillator based Physically Unclonable Function, Mateusz Budnik, BSc
- Observability of off-the-shelf microarchitectures based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, Wouter van Huffelen, MSc
- Fuzzing: A Comparison of Fuzzing Tools, Suhas Belle Lakshminarayan, MSc
- Towards Future Proof Cryptographic Implementations: Side-Channel Analysis On Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism CRYSTALS - Kyber, Jelle Meijer, MSc
- Radiation resilience evaluation of a Flash-based FPGA with a soft RISC-V core, Kevin Böhmer, MSc
- Evaluation of On-line Reconfiguration Techniques for a Distributed Avionic Middleware., Glen te Hofsté, MSc
- A Simple Homomorphic Obfuscation Scheme over Automorphisms, Lars Willemsen, MSc
2022
Do your thesis with us!
We are always looking for bright students willing to push the envelope of the state-of-the-art in reliability and hardware security. For formally defined thesis assignments, you can look at the Master assignments or the Bachelor assignments. We also have broader subjects that we can tailor to the abilities of possible candidates, such as:
- Development of lightweight Hardware Checkers to detect reliability and security threats in a RISC-V core.
- Hardware Simulation, with a focus on software development (work on the simulation tool itself) for fault injection.
- Hardware security primitives, including PUFs and random number generators, with a focus on electrical engineering.
- Development of reliability enhancements on a RISC-V core and validation with radiation experiments.
- Multiple projects derived from our ESA partnership.
