Ing. Thibaut Vandervelden obtained his MSc degree in Engineering Technology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2019. He is now working on his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is teaching assistant in programming and electronics courses.
The 5G networks are expected to massively expand today’s IoT. Secure communication among IoT devices in a centralized architecture has been well studied during the last decade. However, an important shortcoming in this field is establishment of a strong robust platform enabling security features without the dependency of one single trusted third party or certificate authority. This is important, not only to avoid the existence of a big brother scenario and guarantee anonymity with respect to the infrastructure, but also to avoid a single point of failure. Some trust models have been already developed for addressing the trustworthiness of the different entities.
In this PhD I will define, develop and evaluate a scalable, efficient and practical platform enabling secure communication. It will include key management and access control, between the different objects considering novel programming paradigms for lightweight devices, to design, implement and evaluate the lower layer communication protocols together with the security aspects. Besides confidentiality, authentication and integrity protection of the data, also anonymity with respect to the infrastructure needs to be considered.