Since March 2019, I’m a researcher and Ph.D. Student at Klaus Wehrle’s Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems at RWTH Aachen University after I graduated with an M.Sc. in Computer Science in September 2018 and received my B.Sc. in 2016. More precisely, I’m part of the Security and Privacy Group.
Currently, my research interests focus on but are not limited to Network Security for Industrial Networks.
M.Sc. in Computer Science, 2018
RWTH Aachen University
B.Sc. in Computer Science, 2016
RWTH Aachen University
📃 I summarized our research results on Internet-reachable OPC UA systems for the APNIC Blog.
📰 Martin Henze and I got interviewed about details on our OPC UA Internet measurements. The interview is published on All-Electronics (in German).
📰 Our research on Internet-facing OPC UA deployments got picked up by heise online (in German) and All-Electronics (in German).
📄 Our paper on privacy-preserving production parameter exchange got accepted at ACSAC.
📄 Our paper on insecure Internet-facing OPC UA deployments got accepted at IMC.
💾 We released our OPC UA assessment modules for Metasploit.
📄 Our paper on realizing onion routing for constrained IoT devices got accepted at ICNP.
The ongoing digitization of industrial manufacturing leads to a decisive change in industrial communication paradigms. Moving from traditional one-to-one to many-to-many communication, publish/subscribe systems promise a more dynamic and efficient exchange of data. However, the resulting significantly more complex communication relationships render traditional end-to-end security futile for sufficiently protecting the sensitive and safety-critical data transmitted in industrial systems. Most notably, the central message brokers inherent in publish/subscribe systems introduce a designated weak spot for security as they can access all communication messages. To address this issue, we propose ENTRUST, a novel solution for key server-based end-to-end security in publish/subscribe systems. ENTRUST transparently realizes confidentiality, integrity, and authentication for publish/subscribe systems without any modification of the underlying protocol. We exemplarily implement ENTRUST on top of MQTT, the de-facto standard for machine-to-machine communication, showing that ENTRUST can integrate seamlessly into existing publish/subscribe systems.
Due to increasing digitalization, formerly isolated industrial networks, e.g., for factory and process automation, move closer and closer to the Internet, mandating secure communication. However, securely setting up OPC UA, the prime candidate for secure industrial communication, is challenging due to a large variety of insecure options. To study whether Internet-facing OPC UA appliances are configured securely, we actively scan the IPv4 address space for publicly reachable OPC UA systems and assess the security of their configurations. We observe problematic security configurations such as missing access control (on 24% of hosts), disabled security functionality (24%), or use of deprecated cryptographic primitives (25%) on in total 92% of the reachable deployments. Furthermore, we discover several hundred devices in multiple autonomous systems sharing the same security certificate, opening the door for impersonation attacks. Overall, in this paper, we highlight commonly found security misconfigurations and underline the importance of appropriate configuration for security-featuring protocols.
More and more traditional services, such as malware detectors or collaboration services in industrial scenarios, move to the cloud. However, this behavior poses a risk for the privacy of clients since these services are able to generate profiles containing very sensitive information, e.g., vulnerability information or collaboration partners. Hence, a rising need for protocols that enable clients to obtain knowledge without revealing their requests exists. To address this issue, we propose a protocol that enables clients (i) to query large cloud-based knowledge systems in a privacy-preserving manner using Private Set Intersection and (ii) to subsequently obtain individual knowledge items without leaking the client’s requests via few Oblivious Transfers. With our preliminary design, we allow clients to save a significant amount of time in comparison to performing Oblivious Transfers only.
I am and have been involved in several teaching activities at RWTH Aachen University and I am advising and have (co-)advised several student theses. Please refer to my institute profile for further information.