SoS Research Profile: KU Leuven, Belgium
SoS Research Profile: KU Leuven, Belgium
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Catholic University of Leuven abbreviated K.U. Leuven, is a research university in the Dutch-speaking town of that name in Flanders, Belgium, founded in 1834. It conducts teaching, research, and services in the natural sciences, engineering, humanities, medicine, law, and social sciences. Perhaps one of the lesser well-known globally significant universities addressing cybersecurity, K.U. Leuven is an important contributor to the Science of Security.
Graduates include Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, cryptographers and co-designers of Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Daemen also co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the SHA-3 hash in the U.S. by NIST in 2012. Rijmen currently holds a professorship at the university. He was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 and as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "co-designing AES, contributions to the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric primitives, and service to the IACR."
K.U. Leuven’s Department of Computer Science conducts research at a high international level and provides academic education in the fields of informatics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematical engineering, and digital humanities. With more than 30 professors, 150 PhD students, 700 masters students and associated staff members, the Computer Science Department is a strong international research and education department.
In the past two decades, researchers affiliated with K.U. Leuven have published 40,000 scholarly and technical articles in the Journals of the ACM and IEEE. Their primary research facility is the ESAT/COSIC: ESAT is the Dutch acronym for Department of Electrical Engineering; COSIC stands for COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography.
Researchers are distributed in four research units and are divided into seven research groups. They study methods and develop tools to master the ever-increasing complexity of designing, implementing and maintaining reliable software systems, including numerical computations.
The Informatics Section currently focuses on distributed and secure software, security-critical systems, embedded and ubiquitous software, distributed and internet applications, declarative languages and artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction.
NUMA, the Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics Section is addressing numerical approximation, linear algebra, scientific computing, numerical integration and nonlinear equations & software.
At the Kulak Kortrijk Campus, researchers are looking at combinatorial optimisation and decision support, construction of models, and the behaviour and the application of metaheuristics for combinatorial optimisation at the common frontier of artificial intelligence and optimisation.
Secure and mobile software, functional and embedded programming, artificial intelligence, physical computing, and digital media are being studied at the Computer Science Technology Cluster.
The large faculty and support facilities and staff allow a wide range of research projects to be pursued. Some current research projects have produced papers published on secure, reliable and resilient sCPS, formally-verified software-based security architecture for the Internet of Things, design principles for true random number generators for security applications, privacy-preserving cryptographic key derivation, frequency injection attack based on IEMI and EM information leakage, secure architecture-based adaptations, PUFs and the Monte Carlo PUF, Scalable and Secure LPWAN Networks using cryptographic frequency hopping, reuse of privacy knowledge for threat elicitation, exposing cookie policy flaws through an extensive evaluation of browsers and their extensions, and minimum energy quantized neural networks.
Their work addresses the Science of Security community hard problems of resilience, scalability, cyber-physical systems, and privacy, as well as cryptography and software assurance.
More information in English about cybersecurity research at U.K. Leuven can be found on their Computer Science Department web site at: https://wms.cs.kuleuven.be/cs/english/research