Acceleration Programme

SIMMS Project

The Challenge

Drones and mobile robots are widely used today, with applications available in industries such as agriculture, transport, construction, law enforcement, security and the environment, etc. As a result, the growth within the drone sector has increased 300% year-on-year, with most countries opting to introduce new rules and regulations to enable their safe use. However, the majority of current applications rely on single, manually operated or autonomous drones, which face limitations in terms of mission duration, range and the number of sensors that can be used. Multi-UAV systems are a promising approach to overcome these limitations, however it is currently limited to fleet models which traditionally have predetermined flight plans or limited centralised intelligence.

The Solution

The project entitled SIMMS, brings swarming intelligence to off-the-shelf drones, as well as other types of vehicles, thanks to its ‘plug-and-play’ artificial intelligence smart box. The technology developed within the SIMMS project will bring a new dimension to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, allowing for a more optimised, secure and reliable approach. Inspired by nature’s swarms, such as bird flocks and ant colonies, these drones will work collectively and take decisions locally to achieve their common goal. Thanks to the unique technology, this multi-UAV system will not only allow for an unprecedented range of action and mission duration, but it will also achieve unseen reliability – they will self-organise in case of failure in one or more UAVs – and scalability.

The Team

SIMMS team is comprised of AI and business experts, eager to boost the capabilities of drones with a cutting-edge and unique approach. SIMMS began as an FNR proof-of-concept project at SnT in 2019 within the Parallel Computing & Optimisation (PCOG) research group. Grégoire Danoy, deputy head of PCOG, leads the scientific and technical development with more than 15 years of experience in AI’s applications and drone swam projects with the European Defence Agency and US Navy. Pascal Bouvry, head of PCOG, has strong C-level experience in the ICT domain and acts as a scientific and technology mentor. Pierre-Yves Houitte and Dany Donnen are also dedicated to the project, with Houitte specialising in embedded software, and Donnen, serial entrepreneur, applying his 30 years of experience to business development.

The Goal

To support the success of SIMMS, the team are searching for partners who are looking to incorporate – or currently use – drones, and may be looking to incorporate swarm technology. The team would also be open to companies looking to directly license the SIMMS’ swarming technology.

NoCry Project

The Challenge

Cryptographic ransomware are malicious programs that make criminal use of cryptography, and are the most serious cyber threat today. They infect computers, encrypt sensitive data, exfiltrate files, and extort money with a promise to reverse the damage that’s, unfortunately, not always met. The average demand in 2021 is half a million USD, with the highest being around 50 million USD, so the victims are high-stake organisations and institutions.

The sad truth is that if it implements cryptography by the book, cryptographic ransomware leaves no way to reverse the damage but to pay up. Criminals do not care if the payment causes a long, partial, painful, and uncertain recovery, if not an end to a business. Their sea is full of fish.

The Solution

Against ransomware, it would be better to not become infected – but this is wishful thinking. Keeping backups is the most common advice, but restoring old copies of the data after an attack is never easy, complete, or painless. Unfortunately, one ransomware attack can be enough to disrupt a business.

The second-best defence is to prevent an attack from doing any damage. At SnT, we patented a solution that achieves this goal: it pre-emptively blocks cryptographically-strong ransomware before they can encrypt.

Our solution, UShallNotPass, is secure, lightweight, and adaptive. It relies on a strong theoretical idea. Tested against hundreds of active ransomware, it has shown no false-negative and no false-positive after training in the medium range. It worked against a few new samples of ransomware before they were reported in official black lists.

It blocks only cryptographically strong ransomware but it seamlessly runs in harmony with existing anti-malware that protect against known and less disruptive threats. UShallNotPass is a front-line defence against the nastiest ransomware that exist today.

The Team

UShallNotPass has been prototyped by SnT’s Interdisciplinary Research in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity (IRiSC) research group. The original idea was conceived as a collaboration between Dr. Ziya Alper Gen, Prof. Lenzini Gabriele, and Prof. Peter Y. A. Ryan, head of the Applied Security and Information Assurance Group (APSIA). We are experts in cryptography, applied security, and security engineering.

The Goal

UShallNotPass works on end-user computers, and is meant for organisations and institutions whose core business depends on the protection of their data. They can be the next victims.

This project, NoCry, intends to bring UShallNotPass to a Technology Readiness Level 5. We are looking for investors and for partners to continue our research on the subject of ransomware.

NIR Watchdog Project

The Challenge

Nowadays, companies can experience significant losses due to the large volume of high-quality counterfeits. Direct annual losses in the pharmaceuticals and cosmetics industries alone amounted to $39.7 billion in 2015, and are expected to be around $107 billion in 2022. It would be easier for companies to protect their businesses on the market if they had a quick and easy tool to measure and monitor the quality of their products in a confident and trusted manner, directly from the shelves. This way, companies would have the possibility to quickly react and trace forged products, and substantially reduce their revenue loss.

The Solution

NIR Watchdog is a product providing quality control solution to various industries, such as food, beverages, fragrances, luxury cosmetics, and many more. It is a device agnostic tool that allows the possibility to reduce the number of counterfeit materials by using electromagnetic reflectance readings from a Near-Infrared (NIR) Spectrometer.  Our Anti-counterfeit solution combines NIR devices, machine learning, blockchain technology, automated storage, and a customised smartphone application to provide a quick, simple and portable tool to reduce the number of high-quality counterfeited products on the market.

The Team

The idea for NIR Watchdog began as a proof-of-concept project at SnT in early 2020. It consolidated an international team of five members, each one passionate about data-driven solutions that are applicable to tackle real-world problems. Today, our team unifies experts in machine learning, AI, blockchain, security, and software developments. Among them, Hui Huang (Ph.D.) and Yussef Akl (Masters) who work as the lead researchers on the project, are responsible for the training of our models and identifying key data references. Wazen Shbair (Ph.D.) works on the integration of the technical components developed by the team, while Edward Berkovitch serves as our business and marketing advisor with international experience for over six years. Lastly, Prof. Radu State, with experience spanning ten years in data science and internet security, acts as a scientific advisor of the project.

The Goal

The targeted industry for the NIR Watchdog project includes, but is not limited to, several industries, such as food, beverages, fragrances, pharmaceuticals, luxury goods, and many more who suffer from counterfeiting. During the POC phase in 2020-2021, NIR Watchdog acquired an early adopter and was able to achieve remarkable results, which led to new outputs and allowed a partnership with the pharmaceutical industry. As of today, NIR Watchdog is involved in an advanced collaboration with leading chocolate and international pharmaceutical company. As a next step, we are looking for an early adopter and a potential partner in an anti-counterfeit industry to expand our opportunities on the market.  We hope to soon operate as a fully formed spin-off of SnT, and actively participate in worldwide hackathons, conferences, and competitions.

MoneyInBox

The Problem

The unbanked population in the target region of sub-Saharan Africa can only rely on mobile money systems offered by telecom operators for their cashless payments, transfers, and remittances. Indeed, while banking penetration is lower than 15%, mobile money is picking up across the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) with penetration over 25% and growing. Larger mobile network operators (MNOs) lead the industry, and traditional financial service players are still looking for profitable ways to reach more customers through a branchless approach. MNO mobile money systems carry hefty fees, inconvenient (USSD aesthetics is poor), insecure (SMS is easily hackable), and are closed systems (i.e., offering little support for developing new services on top). In the last decade, they have empowered social innovation. Today, they carry bottlenecks that prevent technology innovation for scaling to businesses and consolidating inclusive growth based on interoperable transactions.

The Solution

MoneyInBox will fast-track market entry and improve the economics of these players by offering infrastructure-sharing services. Specifically, MoneyInBox implements and fully manages mobile banking services (including micro-lending) on behalf of banks, monetary financial institutions (MFIs), and MNOs. Opportunistically, MoneyInBox might issue e-money on behalf of non-regulated account and transactional services providers, such as MFIs and FinTech startups. Technically, MoneyInBox builds on a software stack, which is a sound security research by-product. This stack builds on permissioned ledgers, combined with cryptographic algorithms to provide a good alternative towards the implementation of a new generation of mobile money. Furthermore, the MoneyInBox solution is modular, from regulatory to sales and distribution management.

The Team

MoneyInBox is a team of three co-founders passionate about technology, especially the use of ICT for development. Our journey began following up the compilation of research results investigating the (in)security of financial apps used in the sub-Saharan African context. This investigation was initiated by Tegawendé F. Bissyandé at the University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT) in early 2017. He then proposed the architectural design that Sankalp and Kader implemented after we have re-positionned the solution as a white brand solution (following fruitful market investigations with Benjamin Deranssart). Today, MoneyInBox is exploring a partnership with TechPoleExpertise, located in Burkina Faso, to market the solutions. Initial co-creation effort with LaPoste Burkina Faso is being driven by Tech Pole Expertise Manager, Modeste.

The Goal

The MoneyInBox team is currently looking for implementation partners in the WAEMU region. We will also welcome new team members with backgrounds in marketing and business-related to technology for development, or with technical backgrounds in UX. 

NOFAKES

The Problem

Counterfeit goods plague our economy. Only in 2019, the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights (EUIPO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that the global trade of substandard, spurious, falsely labeled, falsified, and counterfeit (SSFFC) products amounts to more than 400 billion euros, 2.5% of the world’s trade.

Still, today there is no widespread technology that could mitigate the problem once and for all and across different business sectors. Technical and non-technical requirements for market-acceptable anti-counterfeiting solutions (e.g., security and robustness, efficiency, and aesthetics) vary from sector to sector.  

The Solution

We combine two different technologies to achieve what we claim to be a highly secure and versatile anti-counterfeiting solution.

•  The Caesar Technology, from soft matter physics, is used to produce Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors (CSRs), microspheres of liquid crystals, used to build coatings or tags that reflect light in unclonable unique optical patterns, and applicable to a great variety of objects (e.g., food, medicine, diamonds, and artworks);

• The NoFakes Authentication Technology, from computer security, is used to extract identifiable data from pictures of CSRs taken with simple readout devices and to verify their authenticity and the authenticity of the good that carries it.

We are also working to extend these technologies to create a coating that is invisible to the human eye and to extract cryptographically secure keys to achieving higher security guarantees for supply chain integrity.

The Team

Two teams at the University of Luxembourg are carrying out the project:

• The Interdisciplinary Research in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity (IRiSC) of the Interdisciplinary Center for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT).

• The Experimental Soft Matter Physics (ESMP) within the Department of Physics and Materials Science of the Faculty of Science Technology and Medicine (FSTM).

Our interdisciplinary team counts on the expertise of computer science researchers (Prof. G. Lenzini, Dr. H. Demirci, and Dr. M. Arenas Correa) and researchers in soft matter physics and chemistry (Prof. J. P. Lagerwall, Dr. Y. Geng, Dr. R. Kizhakidathazhath, and Dr. H. Agha).

The Goal

We aim to demonstrate the technical feasibility of reliably authenticating objects coated or tagged with CSRs identifiers. We intend to prove the commercial viability of the solutions to attract private interest, for instance, from the jewelry, valuable goods, and art sectors. We look for investors willing to help us to bring our solution to the next technology readiness level. 

DREAM

The Problem

When buying a product, as a consumer you’re used to paying for the value it provides you with, but may not be willing to pay for costs incurred from transport or waste. While this is normal for the consumer, it poses a problem for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), because they often have an increased product diversity that requires a greater logistics effort and higher personnel costs with respect to turnover – as such, profit margins can be as little as 5-8%. They are also much more sensitive to market uncertainties, and likely won't have the capital to invest in better machinery. All of these factors result in stressed employees with insecure jobs, and they may even lose their skilled workers to larger enterprises, not to mention a higher likelihood of closure. By contrast, larger companies can afford a higher degree of automation, more homogenous products and are able to reduce their personnel costs with respect to turnover – all areas in which profit margin can be increased.

The Solution

Our solution’s aim is to increase the productivity of an SME, with low overall investment, in order to make jobs more attractive. With our solution, we let employees focus on value creation, and therefore increase the turnover by keeping personnel costs constant. We offer a robust mobile robotics solution that enables companies to automate their intra-logistic processes by retro-fitting forklifts or investing in a new fleet of mobile robots. With our technology, the mobile robot adapts to a company’s needs, and not vice versa, which is important for production lines with specific production requirements. Thanks to retrofitting and no needed investment in infrastructure, we present an adaptive and attractive solution.

The Team

The team comprises two passionate engineers, Dr. Christian Hammes and Johann Fuchs, and a technical advisor, Dr. Bhavani Shankar Mysore Rama Rao, who is from the side of SnT of the University of Luxembourg.

Dr. Hammes is the innovator of our underlying secret spice – our sophisticated radar network technology. He is responsible for the strategic decisions and is dedicated to achieving the best product-market fit possible, by translating client needs and requirements into technical concepts and features. Fuchs is the technical executive and translates the technical features further into machine language, our proprietary software. He has almost a decade of experience in professional software development for industrial applications and knows how to efficiently design production-ready software, as well as how to make it maintainable and scalable. 

The Goal

Our goals for the DREAM project include seeking investment support to continue refining the product, as well as undertaking pilot projects to finalise its development and finished concept. An important milestone will also be extending the team by taking on sales and marketing representatives. 

Online Work-it-out pLatform (OWL)

The Problem

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). When individuals survive cardiovascular failure, they should participate in cardiac rehabilitation programmes for the rest of their lives. In 2019 (the last data available from the Global Burden of Disease project), ‘survivors’ were more than 500 million globally, 92 million in Europe, and 55,000 in Luxembourg. However, most drop out of their programme because it involves continued visits to medical centres. Long-term, this inconvenience is a large contributing factor, alongside the ongoing pandemic. According to scientific literature, less than 1% of eligible patients in Luxembourg participate in a long-life maintenance programme. Physiotherapists have already started to provide remote cardiac rehabilitation in response to COVID restrictions. Still, the available tools don’t perform efficiently because they are not tailored to this particular use case.

The Solution

Our solution, tailored for remote cardiac rehabilitation, is OWL – a platform featuring videoconference software with real-time, secure transmission of vital signs. Physiotherapists will host their patients in a virtual room to perform cardiac rehabilitation. Before joining the session, patients are guided to wear a heart rate monitor, for example a bracelet or a chest strap. On its screen, the physiotherapists view the heartbeat measurements of each patient, and they use this feedback to tailor ongoing sessions according to their needs. OWL also supports extra features, such as alarm setting for when measurements exceed a predefined threshold, management of patients and sessions and recording of sessions, including the heartbeat measurements of each patient.

The Team

The core team consists of Dr. Antonio Ken Iannillo as project lead; Dr. Wazen Shbair as the technical leader; and Denisa Sustalova as business developer. The core team is supported by SnT’s Prof. Radu State; Dr. Patrick Feiereisen from the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg’s (CHL) physiotherapy department; and Dr. Alexis Lion from the Fédération Luxembourgeoise des Associations de Sport de Santé (FLASS).

The Goal

OWL aims to be supplied to medical care centres that offer cardiac rehabilitation programmes, starting with Luxembourg and expanding throughout Europe. By enabling efficient remote cardiac rehabilitation programmes, medical centres can take care of more patients using fewer resources. Physiotherapists can work better with patients knowing their actual effort during the remote session. OWL already presented a minimal prototype to test its main functionalities with earlier adopters, such as classes from the Association Luxembourgeoise des Groupes Sportifs pour Cardiaques (ALGSC). Now, we are looking for more skilled developers to implement all the requirements collected from the medical staff and more investment to face the cost of certifying OWL as a software medical device.

SecuBox

 The Problem

Nowadays, the software is omnipresent across all businesses and is even a core operational asset. However, software is vulnerable because humans develop it, which puts companies at risk. Practitioners agree that today’s companies need to bring security confidence into their information systems. Yet, cyber-attacks occur regularly and with fatal consequences – the average cost of a data breach due to a software vulnerability is estimated at $4.3M in 2021. This is the consequence of three major reasons: 1) the current cybersecurity market lacks expertise; 2) the current cybersecurity market is facing a shortage of more than 3.5 million experts; and 3) practitioners do not secure their codebases or mainly rely on manual processes.

The Solution                          

We propose SecuBox, an automated security testing solution that scans security properties in different product lines, such as software and source code (e.g., websites, mobiles apps, Java source code, etc.) to overcome the current market limitations. SecuBox is built with top-notch static analysis research prototypes that emerge from SnT. It not only provides testing of main vulnerabilities (e.g., top 10 OWASP), but it also solves non-trivial problems like dataflow analyses. It allows for overcoming human limitations – such as lack of expertise or human brain limitation for data propagation – and does not need prior knowledge of the codebase/software. Besides, as an automated solution, SecuBox scales to large codebases and the number of customers.

The Team

The Secubox solution emerged from SnT’s Trustworthy Software (TruX) research group in early 2021. Our team comprises three inspired and ambitious members, who are eager and motivated to confront research prototypes to real-world problems in the software security ecosystem. The team combines expertise in software engineering, software security, software testing, and a strong passion for these topics. The primary driver of this project is Jordan Samhi, who will mainly develop SecuBox and aggregate research prototypes to marketable products. He is directly advised by Prof. Jacques Klein and Prof. Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, who will bring their scientific and technical expertise, and Mauro Mariani, who will operate as his business advisor with strong experience during this journey.

The Goal

As a dematerialised solution, SecuBox has no constraint on geography or the industry type. Therefore, the targeted audience is vast and includes companies producing code and relying on third-party software. We are currently running the FNR JUMP21 POC project, and we closely cooperate with SnT’s Technology Transfer Office (TTO) and the technology business incubator Technoport. Prior to the FNR Jump POC, we engaged with companies who supported the project with letters of intent and proposed to be the first beta-testers. Hence, our next steps are 1) setting up the MVP; and 2) scoping the market for early adopters. Our team’ students with a technical and business-related background will help build the product and relations with the market. Our ultimate goal is to create a future spin-off of SnT and act as a market leader in software security.

PPOC - Precoding Proof of Concepts 

The Problem

Advanced interference management and mitigation techniques at the transmitter, typically termed precoding, has shown excellent potential for improving the system capacity of high- frequency re-use multiple spot-beam interactive satellite networks. Precoding is the most promising technology for the future generation of very high-throughput satellite (VHTS) systems, providing an increase in capacity of 30% up to 100%, and a cost-benefit over the existing generation of VHTS and mobile satellite systems. The implementation of precoding comes with several technical challenges, which have been the bottleneck for its implementation during the last few years. These technical challenges become even more acute for satellite systems working in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) due to the fast variation of the properties of the communication channels. This project aims to overcome these technical challenges and improve the confidence of the satellite industry on precoding.

The Solution

The implementation of precoding techniques on the gateway allows multi-beam satellite systems to operate in aggressive frequency reuse modes, giving a phenomenal performance gain over the non-precoded counterpart, while maintaining a reasonable complexity at the modems. This performance gain can be translated into a fourfold improvement of the system throughput, double the improvement of availability, and double the improvement of the energy efficiency. This translates into the possibility of providing internet connectivity at higher data rates in remote rural areas, and provide sustained connectivity to airliners and cruise ships.

The Team

The PPOC team is comprised of members of SnT’s SIGCOM and CommLab group, which includes Symeon Chatzinotas, Juan Duncan, Jorge Luis Gonzalez, and Jevgenij Krivochiza (Alumni).

The Goal

The objective is to develop the modems used at the gateway side (ground-based) at the satellite operator. We would also like to find an industrial partner with experience in the field that could help SNT’s SIGCOM team to produce the Precoded-Enabled Gateway Modems. Additional help with business management would be highly appreciated.