Software Engineering

How software-engineers work in the DEDIS-lab

Many of today’s research projects aim to not only explore and provide new theoretical concepts but also prove their practical feasibility, which is often realised in the form of software tools.

As software engineers we help to put into practice the ideas developed in research projects of the DEDIS lab and ensure that the created software is of high quality, so that other people can build on it and reproduce the results. Our daily work includes:

  • PhD-student support
  • Development of high-quality, easy-to-use software tools
  • Collaboration with teams from other software projects

One of our main occupations over the last year has been the implementation of the cothority framework that enables easy integration, deployment, and evaluation of distributed and decentralised algorithms developed by the research staff of the DEDIS lab. These implementations can be tested locally, on testing platforms (such as Deterlab), or can even be deployed in a real-world scenario. The cothority framework significantly speeds up the time from protocol specification to actual deployment, ensures reproducibility, and improves the overall quality of the conducted research.

We furthermore also support third-party teams, that are interested in our projects, to integrate our implementations into their code base so that they can benefit from our work as well. In particular, we worked on enhancements for Google’s certificate transparency project, for The Update Framework (TUF) to secure software deployment, for the anonymity network Tor, or for the key management system Coniks.

Want to Work with Us?

We post jobs for software engineers from time to time on our page at StackOverflow.