For his master thesis on “Secure Device Pairing Using Short-Range Acoustic Communication” emergenCITY researcher Florentin Putz received the KuVS 2020 Science Award for the best master thesis. The prize was awarded at the NetSys 2021 Conference. KuVS is the special interest group on “Communication and Distributed Systems” of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft im VDE (ITG), with over 1000 members from science and business. Every year, the group honors outstanding theses in its field.

In his master thesis, emergenCITY researcher Florentin Putz developed a secure communication method with which data can be transferred easily between smartphones. The innovative aspect is that the data is transmitted directly between the devices by acoustic waves and thus no additional central infrastructure is required. With this type of transmission, the modulation method can be freely selected so that data transmission can be secured directly at the physical layer. The master thesis was supervised by emergenCITY-Professor Matthias Hollick.

More exciting information on the topic can be found in the video for the award ceremony and the paper on acoustic communication methods. In the future, Florentin Putz will continue his research at emergenCITY on how acoustic communication methods can be made more robust and resilient.