Systems and Security

Researchers at LIACS are working to devise the computers of tomorrow that will be the backbone of the Cloud and Edge computing paradigms as well as the Internet of Things. In this respect, we are involved in research and development of high performance computing systems, embedded & real-time computing systems, and the necessary (cyber) security methods and techniques to protect such systems.

Cyber security

Cyber security is one of the critical challenges in our inter-connected world. Organizations are being constantly targeted by adversaries. Various critical systems become exposed on the Internet. Users can find that their data has been stolen from a company that they were not even aware of. The Cyber Security Lab investigates attacks and defenses spanning organizations, systems and software. Their current research focuses on two main areas: security risk management and threat modeling, and mobile security. 

High performance computing

A high performance computer or supercomputer owes its massive processing capacity to the fact that it chops a single overarching task into a whole series of smaller tasks. It simultaneously tackles each of those smaller problems. This parallel computing approach makes the system much faster and more efficient. We also work on distributed computing, in which systems perform independent tasks, meanwhile communicating about it among themselves.

Large-scale Computing Infrastructure

Large-scale computing infrastructure, such as supercomputers, cluster, and clouds, are already pervasive, most members of our society interact with them daily: social networks, government services, media streaming services--all systems heavily interfacing with the members of our society--are powered by such large-scale infrastructure. However, scale comes at the cost of increased complexity and resource usage. We work on understanding such complexity, improving their efficiency, novel programming models and frameworks, and on achieving reproducible and repeatable science running atop large-scale computing infrastructure.

Leiden Embedded & Real-time Computing

Leiden Embedded & Real-time Computing (LERC) is an expert lab and leader in advanced research on embedded and real-time systems and software. The main mission of LERC is by its research to contribute in a highly innovative way to the system-level design of embedded and cyber-physical systems and software -- conceptually (theory), methodologically (design methods and tools), and structurally (platforms/architectures). The LERC lab researches Cyber-Physical Systems, which are application-domain specific, information processing systems that are tightly coupled to the physical environment. More specifically, they have been investigating and devising fundamental methods and model-based techniques  as well as implementing them in software tools for the specification, design and development, programming, and verification of Embedded Systems-on-Chip (SoC).
More information about LERC