02234 - Research Topics in Cybersecurity - Autumn 2025

General Information

Time: Tuesdays 13 - 17
Location:
    Tuesday 13-15, lecture in auditorium 13, building 308 (or online when announced)
    Tuesday 15-17, independent group work in the same room (or wherever you want)
Lecturers:
    Nicola Dragoni (course responsible)
    Lejla Islami
    Maria Papaioannou
    Gaurav Choudhary
    Mina Sheikh Alishahi (Open University)
    Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis
    Tyge Tiessen
    Christian Majenz
    Luisa Siniscalchi
    Carsten Baum

Objectives

The objective of the course is to provide knowledge of selected advanced research topics in cybersecurity, and to give participants practice at investigating topics in the literature and producing written and oral presentations which distill the essential features of a topic on the basis of a literature study.

Course Format

The course is given as a combination of lectures and project work. A number of topics, related to the research interests of the teachers, will be covered during lectures in the first 10 weeks of the course (students should expect to read 2-3 scientific papers in preparation for each lecture). During this time, students will select one of these topics (or any topic in cybersecurity, provided that the topic is approved by the course responsible) and prepare their own "research project" which will be presented during the Student Workshop in the final weeks of the course and written up as a research paper that must be submitted before midnight (CET) on December 30th. Topics considered in the course vary from year to year, in order to expose students to the latest research challenges in cybersecurity. See below the activity plan for 2025.

Students are required to form a small team (2-3 students) and define their own group research project. The research project aims at addressing a cybersecurity problem related to one of the specific topics covered during the lectures or proposed by the students (and accepted by the course coordinator). The project may either be a survey covering and analyzing the state of the art of a certain research subject, or it may focus on a specific problem and propose a solution that addresses that problem. In the latter, the proposed solution should define the security model and present the design for a protocol/mechanism that solves the problem, but no implementation will be required in this course (implementation and evaluation of the proposed solution may be considered a topic for a subsequent special course).

Activity Calendar

Please note that the activity calendar below is preliminary and might be subject to change.

Lecture N.	Date	Activity	Lecturer	Topic
1	02 September	Lecture	Nicola Dragoni Gaurav Choudhary	Course presentation How to write a scientific paper How to write a systematic literature review (Gaurav)
2	09 September	Lecture	Lejla Islami	Conducting Research in Usable Privacy and Security: It's Complicated!
3	16 September	Lecture	Gaurav Choudhary	Next Generation Technology-Driven Digital Era: Cyber Security and Ethics in the CPS-IoT Space
4	23 September	Lecture	Mina Sheikh Alishahi	Trustworthy AI: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities
5	30 September	Lecture	Maria Papaioannou	Demystifying User Authentication for Mobile Devices
6	07 October	Lecture	Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis	An Introduction to Cyber-Deception
Autumn Break
7	21 October	Lecture	Luisa Siniscalchi	Exploring the Beautiful World of Secure Multi-Party Computation
8	28 October	Lecture	Carsten Baum	The Wonderful World of Zero-Knowledge Proofs
9	04 November	Lecture	Christian Majenz	The New NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards - Overview and Some Details About Kyber
10	11 November	Lecture	Tyge Tiessen	Kerckhoff's Principle and Standardization in Cryptography
11	18 November	Student Workshop + Feedback on Projects	Nicola Dragoni	Schedule will be published on DTU Learn
12	25 November	Student Workshop + Feedback on Projects	Nicola Dragoni	Schedule will be published on DTU Learn
13	02 December	Student Workshop + Feedback on Projects	Nicola Dragoni	Schedule will be published on DTU Learn