Expertise
Leading authority in secure software
DistriNet is dedicated to advancing research across key domains Secure Software, Distributed Software, and Software Engineering. Our research is focused on enabling software, systems and services that are secure, resilient, performant and robust, while remaining open and adaptable.
DistriNet's fundamental, strategic and applied research is strongly coupled with valorization in an industrial context. We aim to bring value to society by valorizing cutting edge results in industrial and government collaborations and by enabling new ventures.
Secure software
Secure Software is one of our main activities, supporting solid engineering approaches for the construction and management of secure distributed applications. It addresses offensive as well as defensive methods and techniques.
Distributed software
Research on Distributed Software involves the development and management of software architectures and technologies that accommodate distributed applications. In this area, DistriNet works on safe autonomous and adaptive, multi-agent and network-embedded systems as well as various types of middleware.
Software engineering
In Software Engineering, there are strong synergies with security throughout all stages of the software lifecycle, from analysis and architecture over design, implementation, verification and testing to deployment, configuration, monitoring, dynamic modification, and adaptation.
Read more about how our expertise is applied to our research and education tasks
Secure software and secure systems
The Internet's crucial role as a platform for high-security applications such as e-commerce, e-finance, e-health, and e-government, is rapidly growing, leading to an urgent need for secure software applications, system software and network infrastructures.
Research on secure software involves various aspects of security. It involves developing software with strong security measures at every stage of the development process, ensuring the security of cutting-edge systems such as web application security, network security or security of embedded systems, security management...
We focus on two key subdomains: (1) the area where our research enables the creation and development of software with superior security properties and (2) the specific domain of secure systems.
Distributed software and systems
This field has witnessed a notable diversification with the emergence of large-scale deployments involving a multitude of small devices (e.g. associated with Internet of Things), and global deployments involving multiple cloud-based platforms (multi-clouds of similar type or hybrid clouds). However, the deployment and management of distributed applications, whether aimed at end users or intermediary providers, present a significant challenge due to a lack of expertise and know-how in this field.
Moreover, the increasing demand for data-centric applications that drive many contemporary digital services, stresses the need for robust, performant, and trustworthy distributed systems. The development, deployment, and management of these systems, as well as their consumption as a utility, have become crucial to the digital economy.
The increasing focus on complex architectures and demanding applications that heavily rely on distributed systems require research and education in this domain to remain at the forefront of computer science. The forthcoming challenges in this field call for continued and advanced research.
Areas that we focus on are Web3, Blockchain and Distributed ledger technology (DLT).
Software engineering
Software engineering encompasses a broad spectrum of activities, methods, tools, and techniques that involve analyzing user requirements up to delivering high-quality software solutions (incl. designing, building, testing, supporting software applications that meet the requirements). Within this vast domain, we focus on a significant subset guided by 3 principles: (I) cost-effective modeling techniques for addressing early stages, (II) rigorous verification and testing to validate implementations, and (III) programming environments that promote and enforce best practices. Selected research topics may overlap with our above-mentioned research domains.
Current areas of interest:
- secure programming languages
- tools and support for engineering resilient software systems
- program verification and advanced type systems
- software testing
- security-by-design and privacy-by-design and software architecture
- quantitative, statistical and empirical methods for software engineering research
- software deployment, operations of software distribution, evolution and dynamic modification