Advanced Industrial Network Security (Seminar, SS 2024)

Master-level hands-on lab course on intrusion detection in industrial networks and settings such as production and energy networks. Students will implement and evaluate advanced intrusion detection approaches for industrial networks and/or generate training and test data for such systems.

Organizational Information

  • Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Martin Henze
  • Contact: henze (at) spice (dot) rwth-aachen (dot) de
  • 2 SWS (several deadlines spread throughout the whole semster; block presentations at the end of the semester, likely in September)
  • ECTS Credits: 4-6 (depending on examination regulations)
  • Study programs: Master Computer Science, Master Technical Communication, Master Education Computer Science, Master Data Science, Master Software Systems Engineering, Master Media Informatics, Master Mathematics, Master Erasmus, Master Simulation Sciences, Master Computational Engineering Science
  • Registration: During central registration process in Janaury 2024. See our notes below on the selection process!
  • Language: English

Important Dates

The seminar will stretch the complete semester (not only the lecture period), with the kick-off planned for April and the presentations planned for September. There will be several deadlines spread throughout the semester. Optionally, you can shift most of the workload to the lecture period to reduce interference with any potential exams.

  • Kick-off Meeting: TBD (in April); participation is mandatory; details will be announced to the selected participants via email.
  • Deadlines for submission of papers, reviews and presentations (all hard deadlines) are spread over the semester and announced during the kick-off meeting.
  • Your presentations take place in a block seminar, most likely on one or two days at the end of the semester (probably in September, no fixed date(s) yet). Please take this into account when planning your semester and/or holidays.

Topics

The precise topics will be presented and distributed during the kick-off meeting based on priorities submitted by the students. All topics will center around the challenge of securing industrial networks in application domains such as energy and production. Potential topics might center around research areas such as

  • Security challenges of emerging industrial scenarios: industrial collaboration, Industrial Internet of Things, Internet of Production, cyber-physical systems, 5G/6G …
  • Security paradigms for legacy industrial control systems with tight resource-constraints: low latency security, middlebox-based security, protocol tailoring/engineering, custom ciphers, …
  • Security assessment of industrial networks: passive and active security assessment, security testing, Internet-wide scanning, …
  • Intrusion detection and prevention in future industrial networks: rule-based and anomaly-based intrusion detection, process-aware and semantic intrusion detection, …
  • Infrastructure for industrial network security research: datasets, simulation, emulation, physical testbeds, …

Semindar Details

Your contribution to the seminar is twofold: you present your topic concisely in a 20-minute oral presenation to the other seminar students and you supply a paper providing more detail than the talk on the topic. Furthermore, you are expected to engage in discussions about each talk. Plagiarism of any form is unacceptable and will lead to your immediate suspension from the seminar.

In production of the seminar paper, we follow a “conference organization style”. That means: After the assignment of topics during the kick-off meeting, you first do a literature survey and then prepare a scientific paper about the topic. You are submitting your paper in the same way as you would submit it for a conference: It will be reviewed and you will get back comments for improvement of your paper. The (anonymous) reviewing process will also be done by the seminar participants, i.e., you have to write a review about two or three other seminar papers (and you also get feedback from two or three other students). Based on the comments, you have to prepare the final version of your seminar paper and finally the presentation of your topic.

Papers

While the talk focuses on the overview and details of interest, the paper allows you to discuss your topic in its full breadth and depth. It covers all aspects of the talk and provides additional insights to related work and specific details. The papers are based on the official IEEE conference style and are expected to be between 8 (full) and 9 pages in length (hard limits, excluding references). You will be provided with the required LaTeX template (non-TeXed papers, e.g., Word, will not be accepted).

Talks

The goal of the talk is to give the audience a good understanding of the whole topic and to dive into a few interesting details of the subject matter. The ratio of one to the other depends on the topic and needs to be determined individually. Each talk is scheduled to be 20 minutes, followed by 5 to 10 minutes of interactive discussion.

Prerequisites

There are no formal prerequisites for this seminar (besides those listed in your study regulations), apart from a certain scientific maturity. Depending on your preparation, some topics will be more accessible than others. Ideally, you will have some familiarity with computer networks, (network) security and/or cryptography, but this is not a must.

Selection Process

As seminar spots are in high-demand, please indicate clearly why you are interested in the seminar and how you and other students may benefit from your participation.