02234 - Research Topics in Cybersecurity - Autumn 2026

General Information

Time: Tuesdays 13 - 17
Location:
    Tuesday 13-15, 1st lecture in auditorium 13, building 308; rest of the lectures in auditorium 23, building 341
    Tuesday 15-17, independent group work in the same room (or wherever you want)
Lecturers:
    Nicola Dragoni (course responsible)
    Lejla Islami
    Sebastian Alexander Mödersheim
    Gaurav Choudhary
    Alberto Maria Mongardini
    Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis
    Tyge Tiessen
    Christian Majenz
    Luisa Siniscalchi
    Edlira Dushku

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 11 weeks of the course. Students should expect to read 2-3 scientific papers in preparation for each lecture or as further material to deep dive into the lecture's subject.

Students are required to form a small team (2-3 students) and work on their own group research project. The research project aims at addressing a cybersecurity problem related to one of the specific topics covered in the lectures or proposed by the students (provided that the topic is approved by the course responsible). The project may either be a literature 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 such 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 is strictly required to pass the exam (implementation and evaluation of the proposed solution may be considered a topic for a subsequent special course).

The research project will be presented by each group during the Student Workshop in the final weeks of the course. In addition, the reseach project will be written up as a research paper that must be submitted before midnight (CET) on January 3rd, 2027.

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 2026.

Activity Calendar

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

Lecture N.	Date	Activity	Lecturer	Topic
1	01 September	Lecture	Nicola Dragoni Alfonso Pedro Ridao	Course presentation (Nicola) Example of Technical Paper (Alfonso): MCP-SecLint: An Open-Source Static Analyzer for Detecting Vulnerabilities in LLM Tool Integrations A. Ridao, M. Safari, Z. Kang, N. Dragoni In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy Analytics (IWSPA), 2026. From Logs to Cyber Threat Intelligence: Mining the Behaviour of Cyber Threats (Nicola)
2	08 September	Lecture	Alberto Maria Mongardini Nicola Dragoni	Measuring Online Harm at Scale across Blockchain and Online Social Network Ecosystems (Alberto) How to write a scientific paper (Nicola)
3	15 September	Lecture	Sebastian Alexander Mödersheim	Logic for Security
4	22 September	Lecture	Gaurav Choudhary	Next Generation Technology-Driven Digital Era: Cyber Security and Ethics in the CPS-IoT Space How to write a systematic literature review
5	29 September	Lecture	Lejla Islami	Conducting Research in Usable Privacy and Security: It's Complicated!
6	06 October	Lecture	Edlira Dushku	Remote Attestation for IoT
Autumn Break
7	20 October	Lecture	Luisa Siniscalchi	Exploring the Beautiful World of Secure Multi-Party Computation
8	27 October	Lecture	Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis	An Introduction to Cyber-Deception
9	03 November	Lecture	Christian Majenz	The Signal Protocol for Instant Messaging Key Exchange
10	10 November	Lecture	Carsten Baum	Privacy in Practice: The EU Digital Identity Wallet
11	17 November	Lecture	Tyge Tiessen	Kerckhoff's Principle and Standardization in Cryptography
12	24 November	Student Workshop Feedback on Projects	Nicola Dragoni	Schedule will be published on DTU Learn
13	01 December	Student Workshop Feedback on Projects	Nicola Dragoni	Schedule will be published on DTU Learn