Karlstad University

Karlstad University was established as a branch of Göteborg University in 1967 and gained independent status as a University College in 1977. In 1999 it was granted the status of a full university. It has ten divisions (Culture and Communication, Social Sciences, Business and Economics, Information Technology, Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Educational Sciences, Health and Caring Sciences, Music as well as Engineering, Physics and Mathematics). The university functions as a hub in the development of the region and as a national and international centre for the generation of knowledge. The establishment of an external liaison office has strengthened the university’s contacts with industry and the community.

The Department of Computer Science within the Division for Information Technology has at about 30 staff members. The main research areas within the department are IT-Security and Privacy, Distributed Systems and Communication, and Software Engineering. Most research projects are conducted in cooperation with industry partners.

The Privacy and Security (PriSec) research group consists of one full professor (Simone Fischer-Hübner), one senior lecturer and five Ph.D. students. The group mainly focuses on mobile Internet security and privacy, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET), security models, security management, and network security. Privacy risks in the mobile Internet, as well as technical means for enhancing the user’s privacy, have been investigated together with Ericsson for the WAP system architecture. Another project in this area conducted in cooperation with the Royal Institute of Technologies investigates Location Privacy Problems and PET Solutions for Mobile IPv6. Security in 3G mobile networks has been studied together with Tieto Enator. The research on computer and network security is conducted in cooperation with the computer security group at Chalmers University of Technology. The overall goal of the research in this constellation is to model security within a dependability framework, and in particular to find quantitative measures of security, i.e., measures that could be used for predictive purposes. Security research projects are conducted on security metrics and security as a Quality of Service (QoS) dimension.

The PriSec group is currently partner in the three EU FP6 IST projects PRIME (Integrated project on “Privacy and Identity Management for Europe”), FIDIS (Network of Excellence “Future of Identity in Society”), and NEWCOM (Network of Excellence in Wireless Communications).