Thomas Engel

• Professor
• Professor at University of Luxembourg

Being part of the 6G ecosystem vision, Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) will enjoy sophisticated tailored services offering road safety and entertainment for users. As one of the 6G cornerstones, Network Slicing (NS) allows the creation of various customized 6G-V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) use cases on the same physical infrastructure. Howeve...

Being part of the 6G ecosystem vision, Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) will enjoy sophisticated tailored services offering road safety and entertainment for users. As one of the 6G cornerstones, Network Slicing (NS) allows the creation of various customized 6G-V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) use cases on the same physical infrastructure. Howeve...

The use of Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems is on the rise, as these systems have a significant impact on reducing operational costs. Toll service providers (TSPs) access various information, including drivers' IDs and monthly toll fees, to bill drivers. While this is legitimate, such information could be misused for other purposes violatin...

In recent years, the scientific community has been focusing on deterministic Ethernet, which has helped drive the adoption of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards. Precision Time Protocol (PTP), specified in IEEE1588 [1], is a TSN standard that enables network devices to be synchronized with a degree of precision that is noticeably higher than...

Tor is a popular privacy-enhancing technology that allows anonymous communication using onion routing. However, such technologies are only helpful if used; therefore, performance is an important aspect. One of the main performance bottlenecks of Tor is the cross-circuit interference (CCI) problem. Tor multiplexes multiple circuits over a single Tra...

Due to the promise of deterministic Ethernet networking, Time Sensitive Network (TSN) standards are gaining popularity in the vehicle on-board networks sector. Among these, Generalized Precision Time Protocol (gPTP) allows network devices to be synchronized with a greater degree of precision than other synchronization protocols, such as Network Tim...

Building accurate Machine Learning (ML) attack detection models for 5G and Beyond (5GB) vehicular networks requires collaboration between Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) nodes. However, while operating collaboratively, ensuring the ML model's security and data privacy is challenging. To this end, this article proposes a secure and privacy-preservation...

Time Sensitive Network (TSN) standards are gaining traction in the scientific community and automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) due to their promise of deterministic Ethernet networking. Among these standards, Generalized Precision Time Protocol (gPTP) - IEEE 802.1AS - allows network devices to be synchronized with a precision far hi...

As part of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Electronic toll collection (ETC) is a type of toll collection system (TCS) which is getting more and more popular as it can not only help to finance the government’s road infrastructure but also it can play a crucial role in pollution reduction and congestion management. As most of the traditiona...

Time Sensitive Network (TSN) standards are gaining traction in the scientific community and automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) due to their promise of deterministic Ethernet networking. Among these standards, Generalized Precision Time Protocol (gPTP)-IEEE 802.1AS-allows network devices to be synchronized with a precision far higher...

5G Vehicle-to-Everything (5G-V2X) communications will play a vital role in the development of the automotive industry. Indeed and thanks to the Network Slicing (NS) concept of 5G and beyond networks (B5G), unprecedented new vehicular use-cases can be supported on top of the same physical network. NS promises to enable the sharing of common network...

Missing data is one of the most persistent problems found in data that hinders information and value extraction. Handling missing data is a preprocessing task that has been extensively studied by the research community and remains an active research topic due to its impact and pervasiveness. Many surveys have been conducted to evaluate traditional...

Advances in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology and onboard sensors have significantly accelerated deploying Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). Integrating V2X with 5G has enabled Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) to CAVs. However, while communication performance has been enhanced, security and privacy issues have increased...

Controller Area Network (CAN) is a masterless serial bus designed and widely used for the exchange of mission and time-critical information within commercial vehicles. Invehicle communication is based on messages sent and received by Electronic Control Units (ECUs) connected to this serial bus network. Although unencrypted, CAN messages are not eas...

Deterioration of the searchability of Pareto dominance-based, many-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms is a well-known problem. Alternative solutions, such as scalarization-based and indicator-based approaches, have been proposed in the literature. However, Pareto dominance-based algorithms are still widely used. In this paper, we propos...

The continuous increase of connectivity in commercial vehicles is leading to a higher number of remote access points to the Controller Area Network (CAN) – the most popular in-vehicle network system. This factor, coupled with the absence of encryption in the communication protocol, poses serious threats to the security of the CAN bus. Recently, it...

Significant progress has been made towards deploying Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology. Integrating V2X with 5G has enabled ultra-low latency and high-reliability V2X communications. However , while communication performance has enhanced, security and privacy issues have increased. Attacks have become more aggressive, and attackers have become...

Topological sorting is an important technique in numerous practical applications, such as information retrieval, recommender systems, optimization, etc. In this paper, we introduce a problem of generalized topological sorting with maximization of choice, that is, of choosing a subset of items of a predefined size that contains the maximum number of...

In recent years a lot of research was conducted within the area of causal inference and causal learning. Many methods were developed to identify the cause-effect pairs. These methods also proved their ability to successfully determine the direction of causal relationships from observational real-world data. Yet in bivariate situations, causal disco...

Modern connected vehicles are equipped with a large number of sensors, which enable a wide range of services that can improve overall traffic safety and efficiency. However, remote access to connected vehicles also introduces new security issues affecting both inter and intra-vehicle communications. In fact, existing intra-vehicle communication sys...

One of the main application scenario that the upcoming 5G systems are expected to support is Internet of Things (IoT) traffic backhauling. With the exponential increase of devices, it follows the critical challenge of handling the huge data volume that they produce. Terrestrial Networks may not be sufficient for that, or not always available. Satel...

Semi-automated Controller Area Network (CAN) reverse engineering has been shown to provide decoding accuracy comparable to the manual approach, while reducing the time required to decode signals. However, current approaches are invasive, as they make use of diagnostic messages injected through the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port and often requir...

Controller Area Network is the most frequently used in-vehicle communication system in the automotive industry today. The communication inside the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is typically encoded using proprietary formats in order to prevent easy access to the information exchanged on the bus. However, it is still possible to decode this info...

In recent years, a lot of research has been conducted within the area of causal inference and causal learning. Many methods have been developed to identify the cause-effect pairs in models and have been successfully applied to observational real-world data to determine the direction of causal relationships. Yet in bivariate situations, causal disco...

Detecting passive attacks is always considered difficult in vehicular networks. Passive attackers can eavesdrop on the wireless medium to collect beacons. These beacons can be exploited to track the positions of vehicles not only to violate their location privacy but also for criminal purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning-b...

While the adoption of connected vehicles is growing, security and privacy concerns are still the key barriers raised by society. These concerns mandate automakers and standardization groups to propose convenient solutions for privacy preservation. One of the main proposed solutions is the use of Pseudonym-Changing Strategies (PCSs). However, ETSI h...

Privacy is a key requirement for connected vehicles. Cooperation between vehicles is mandatory for achieving location privacy preservation. However, non-cooperative vehicles can be a big issue to achieve this objective. To this end, we propose a novel monetary incentive scheme for cooperative location privacy preservation in 5G-enabled Vehicular Fo...

High-fidelity content distribution and other emerging applications of 5G and beyond-5G mobile broadband networking can put massive load on the core and Radio Access Network (RAN). To address this, direct Device to Device (D2D) communication has recently become a first-class citizen of these networks. While Information-Centric Vehicular Networking (...

Fingerprinting is a ready-to-use technology that exploits the diversity and complexity of today’s personal computing devices. Since fingerprinting leaves little to no trace, Do Not Track (DNT) policies are hard to enforce. The upcoming ePrivacy Regulation must consider this technological reality. In this opinion paper, we analyse technical use case...

Current in-vehicle communication systems lack security features, such as encryption and secure authentication. The approach most commonly used by car manufacturers is to achieve security through obscurity-keep the proprietary format used to encode the information secret. However, it is still possible to decode this information via reverse engineeri...

Tor is the most popular anonymization system with millions of daily users and, thus, an attractive target for attacks, e.g., by malicious autonomous systems (ASs) performing active routing attacks to become man in the middle and deanonymize users. It was shown that the number of such malicious ASs is significantly larger than previously expected du...

Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is bringing connected and cooperative mobility closer to reality. Vehicles today are able to produce huge amounts of information, known in the literature as Floating Car Data (FCD), containing status information gathered from sensing the internal condition of the vehicle and the external environment. Adding network...

With the integration of fog networks and vehicular networks, Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) is a promising paradigm to efficiently collect data for improving safety, mobility, and driver experience during journeys. To this end, we exploit the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to propose a fully-programmable, self-configurable, and context-awa...

Vehicular networks are vulnerable to a variety of internal attacks. Misbehavior Detection Systems (MDS) are preferred over the cryptography solutions to detect such attacks. However, the existing misbehavior detection systems are static and do not adapt to the context of vehicles. To this end, we exploit the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradig...

Content downloading of mobile broadband users today routinely causes network load to exceed what the Radio Access Network (RAN) can sustain without degrading user experience. Many works are therefore considering edge or fog computing paradigms and Device to Device (D2D) communication using 4G/5G C-V2X or IEEE 802.11p/bd links to obtain content. Whe...

Website fingerprinting (WFP) is a special type of traffic analysis, which aims to infer the websites visited by a user. Recent studies have shown that WFP targeting Tor users is notably more effective than previously expected. Concurrently, state-of-the-art defenses have been proven to be less effective. In response, we present a novel WFP defense...

Making personal data anonymous is crucial to ensure the adoption of connected vehicles. One of the privacy-sensitive information is location, which once revealed can be used by adversaries to track drivers during their journey. Vehicular Location Privacy Zones (VLPZs) is a promising approach to ensure unlinkability. These logical zones can be easil...

The pseudonym-changing approach is the de-factolocation privacy solution proposed by security standards toensure that drivers are not tracked during their journey. SeveralPseudonym Changing Strategies (PCSs) have been proposed tosynchronize Pseudonym Changing Processes (PCPs) between con-nected vehicles. However, most of the existing strategies are...

Infrastructure-less communications between moving vehicles present emblematic challenges because of high node mobility and link volatility, which may harm the performances of different categories of emerging vehicular applications. In order to move data between vehicles that are not in direct communication range, several distributed routing protoco...

The main objectives of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) vision is to improve road safety, traffic management, and mobility by enabling cooperative communication among participants. This vision requires the knowledge of the current state of the road traffic, which can be obtained by collecting Floating Car Data (FCD) information using De...

This paper presents an overview of a driving simulation platform, which is designed to let users to participate in a study over a longer period of time and in their own home. A small scale study of the platform is presented and an overview of the experiences in running such studies is summarised.

Given the importance of an early anomaly detection, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are introduced in Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). Agents or probes form the cornerstone of any IDS by capturing network packets and extracting relevant information. However, IDSs are facing unprecedented challenges due to the escalation in the n...

Anonymization networks (e.g., Tor) help in protecting the privacy of Internet users. However, the benefit of privacy protection comes at the cost of severe performance loss. This performance loss degrades the user experience to such an extent that many users do not use anonymization networks and forgo the privacy protection offered. Thus, performan...

With the emergence of highly automated and autonomous connected vehicles, rigorous requirements in terms of responsiveness, security and scalability become necessary to enable new services that improve efficiency and safety on the road. In future networks, vehicles need to frequently perform handover procedures while crossing various dense heteroge...

We propose a novel way of linking mobile network signaling data to the state of the underlying urban road network. We show how a predictive model of traffic flows can be created from mobile network signaling data. To achieve this, we estimate the vehicular density inside specific areas using a polynomial function of the inner and exiting mobile pho...

The MQTT application protocol was originally designed for monitoring a oil pipeline through the desert by collecting sensor data via satellite link. Thus, by design MQTT is very suitable for data collection over integrated satelliteterrestrial networks. Leveraging on the MQTT Bridge functionality, in this work we propose a novel architecture with t...

Automotive Ethernet (AE) is becoming more and more relevant to the automotive industry due to its support of emerging in-car applications, which have high bandwidth demands and stringent requirements in terms of latency and time synchronization. One of the standards under consideration for AE is IEEE 802.1 Audio Video Bridging (AVB)/Time Sensitive...

With the emergence of self-driving technology and the ever-increasing demand of bandwidth-hungry applications, providing the required latency, security and computational capabilities is becoming a challenging task. Although being evolving, traditional vehicular radio access technologies, namely WLAN/IEEE 802.11p and cellular networks cannot meet al...

The increasing penetration of connected vehicles nowadays has enabled driving data collection at a very large scale. Many telematics applications have been also enabled from the analysis of those datasets and the usage of Machine Learning techniques, including driving behavior analysis, predictive maintenance of vehicles, modeling of vehicle health...

Since Critical Infrastructures (CIs) use systems and equipment that are separated by long distances, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to monitor their behaviour and to send commands remotely. For a long time, operator of CIs applied the air gap principle, a security strategy that physically isolates the control netw...

As of IEEE 802.11n, a wireless Network Interface Card (NIC) uses Channel State Information (CSI) to optimize the transmission over multiple antennas. CSI contain radio-metrics such as amplitude and phase. Due to scattering during hardware production these metrics exhibit unique properties. Since these information are transmitted unencrypted, they c...

As of IEEE 802.11n, a wireless Network Interface Card (NIC) uses Channel State Information (CSI) to optimize the transmission over multiple antennas. CSI contain radio-metrics such as amplitude and phase. Due to scattering during hardware production these metrics exhibit unique properties. Since these information are transmitted unencrypted, they c...

This paper provides a taxonomy of different forms of autonomous vehicle handover situations. It covers scheduled, emergency and non-emergency handovers and it differentiates between system and driver initiated handovers. The purpose is to examine how the system and driver are responsible for different stages in the transition timeline, i.e., first...

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard interdomain routing protocol. Despite its critical role on the Internet, it does not provide any security guarantees. In response to this, a large amount of research has proposed a wide variety BGP security extensions and detection-recovery systems in recent decades. Nevertheless, BGP remai...

Nowadays Internet-enabled phones have become ubiquitous, and we all witness the flood of information that often arrives with a notification. Most of us immediately divert our attention to our phones even when we are behind the wheel. Statistics show that drivers use their phone on 88% of their trips and on 2015 in the UnitedKingdom 25% of the fatal...

Through this position paper we aim at providing a prototype cognitive security service for anomaly detection in Software Defined Networks (SDNs). We equally look at strengthening attack detection capabilities in SDNs, through the addition of predictive analytics capabilities. For this purpose, we build a learning-based anomaly detection service cal...

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks has a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising and parking notifications, to traffic and emergency warnings. This heterogeneity requires optimizing content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles to deliver data with short latency and without jeopardizing network resources. In this...

In recent years, multimodal transportation has become a challenging approach to route planning. Most existing planning systems usually rely on data sourced from different organisations, enabling the user to select a limited number of routing strategies. As part of the MAMBA project, developed in Luxembourg until 2017, we have been interested in the...

Human mobility has opened up to many themes in recent years. Human behavior and how a driver might react to certain situations, whether dangerous (e.g. an accident) or simply part of the evolution of new technologies (e.g. autonomous driving), leaves many avenues to be explored. Although experiments have been deployed in real situations, it remains...

The website fingerprinting attack aims to infer the content of encrypted and anonymized connections by analyzing traffic patterns such as packet sizes, their order, and direction. Although it has been shown that no existing fingerprinting method scales in Tor when applied in realistic settings, the case of Tor hidden (onion) services has not yet be...

The growing penetration of telematics systems and connectivity in vehicles has enabled a large variety of possible value-added services for drivers and service providers. In particular telematics based real-time driver identification is in interest of entities such as insurance companies, car rentals and public transportation fleet managers. We pro...

Within the world of wireless technologies, Bluetooth has recently been at the forefront of innovation. It is becoming increasingly relevant for vehicles to become aware of their surroundings. Therefore, having knowledge of nearby Bluetooth devices, both inside and outside other vehicles, can provide the listening vehicles with enough data to learn...

In aviation, pilots interact with autopilots almost on a daily basis. With semi-autonomous vehicles, this is not yet the case. In our work, we aimed at finding out what we can learn from pilots' current experiences for the domain of autonomous driving and what implications can be derived. We conducted three in-depth interviews with pilots to invest...

The information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm is attracting more and more interest from the research community due to its peculiarities that make it one of the best candidates for constructing the future Internet. For this reason, there are many papers in literature that study how to transform ICN principles in reality in order to magnify its r...

Recent technological advances and the ever-greater developments in sensing and computing continue to provide new ways of understanding our daily mobility. Smart devices such as smartphones or smartwatches can, for instance, provide an enhanced user experience based on different sets of built-in sensors that follow every user action and identify its...

Both the industrial and the scientific communities are working on problems related to vehicular traffic congestion, intelligent transportation systems, and mobility patterns using information collected from a variety of sources. Usually, a vehicular traffic simulator, with an appropriate scenario for the problem at hand, is used to reproduce realis...

The increasing interest in vehicular communications draws attention to scalability and network congestion problems and therefore on techniques to offload the traffic, typically carried through the infrastructure, to the Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network. Floating content (FC) represents a promising paradigm to share ephemeral content without direct...

This study is assessing the sensitivity of an affordable BCI device in the context of driver distraction in both low-fidelity simulator and real-world driving environments. Twenty-three participants performed a car following task while using a smartphone application involving a range of generic smartphone widgets. On the first hand, the results dem...