Recognition for Two RWTH Graduates

RWTH graduates Dr. Raimondas Sasnauskas and Hossein Shafagh received recognition for their final papers. They wrote their papers at the Chair of Computer Science 4 (Communication and Distributed Systems) at RWTH Aachen under the direction of Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle. The Communication and Distributed Systems department at the Gesellschaft für Informatik and the Informationstechnischen Gesellschaft des Verbands der Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik e.v., VDE for short, annually awards a prize for the best dissertation and best Master's thesis.

In his disseration "Symbolic Execution of Distributed Systems“ Sasnauskas developed a testing process, that efficiently recognizes implementation mistakes the seldom occur in distributed systems. This allows network software to be more secure and reliable. Sasnauskas was also supervised by Dr. Cristian Cadar from the Imperial College London. The junior researcher has been conducting research as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Computing at the University of Utah, USA, since July 2013.

In his Master's thesis titled "Leveraging Public-Key-based Authentication for Internet of Things", Shafagh analyzed the security protocol Datagram TLS, DTLS, with regards to its applicability in networks with restricted resources. The thesis was also supervised by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Shafagh is currently completing doctoral studies at ETH Zürich.

The prizes were awarded during NetSys 2015 in Cottbus.