Steffen Peter is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Information and Computer Science department at UC Irvine. Since August 2012, he has worked in Prof. Tony Givargis' Research Group for the Design Science for Cyber Physical Systems Project.
Steffen received his diploma in computer science (2006) and his PhD (Dr.-Ing) in Computer Engineering (2011) from the Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus (BTU) in Germany. From 2006 to 2012 he worked in the IHP Microelectronics research institute in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, in several national and European research projects.
In the project Mobile Business Engine he designed energy-efficient hardware accelerators for network (TCP/IP) and cryptographic (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) protocols. This work found application in a range of systems on chip for mobile communication that have been manufactured in the IHP 0.25um CMOS technology.
In the European projects UbiSec&Sens and WSAN4CIP, Steffen was involved in the design and implementation of security solutions for wireless sensor networks. The main application area in these projects was the protection of critical infrastructures such as the electric grid, water mains with dependable wireless communication systems. To configure these systems automatically, in his PhD thesis, Steffen proposed a component-based approach that applies models to assess security and dependability in context of application scenario and environment, additionally to properties such as performance, radio, and energy consumption.
From 2010 to 2012 Steffen was technical coordinator of the EU project TAMPRES, which investigated approaches to implement light-weight and tamper resistant sensor nodes for the Future Internet of Things. The work in TAMPRES resulted in a microcontroller, whose instruction set is compatible to the widely used TI MSP430, but which additionally contains a range of side-channel-resistant cryptographic protocols and protection mechanisms to enable trustworthiness for a wide range of distributed sensing and control applications.
Steffens work in IHP was followed with more than 25 reviewed journal, conference and workshop papers, and six registered international patents.
His research interests include modeling of timing, network and dependability aspects in cyber physical systems and wireless sensor networks. He is also interested in the application of such models for system configuration processes that are applicable also for users outside the design community.