René Hummen (Ph.D. student and member of the Distributed Systems Group) was awarded the Ericsson-UMIC-Diploma Thesis Award for his Thesis. The award-winning thesis was advised by the Distributed Systems Group in cooperation with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology in Finland.

The thesis, titled "HIP: Secure Identity-based Middlebox Functions using the Host Identity Protocol (HIP)", evaluates the feasibility of providing identity-based security functions on in-network elements like firewalls. Firewalls play an important role in network access control but typically cannot verify the origin of a packet in data stream efficiently. Mr. Hummen's thesis addresses the problem of the high computational complexity of traditional per-packet authentication mechanisms. Using lightweight authentication techniques, his work enables to considerably improve security in wired and wireless networks while retaining high throughput.

The prize was handed over to René Hummen by Dr. Norbert Niebert (Ericsson Research Aachen) at the annual graduation ceremony (Tag der Informatik).