About
I am an independent expert and consultant in AI security, cybersecurity and IoT, based in Darmstadt, Germany. I support public funding bodies, companies, founders and research teams with independent evaluation, security and architecture reviews, and hands-on prototype development.
Dr.-Ing. Thien Nguyen
Independent Technical Expert & Consultant — AI, Cybersecurity, IoT
For twelve years at TU Darmstadt’s System Security Lab, first as a doctoral and then as a postdoctoral researcher, I worked across the full lifecycle of security research: shaping projects, winning funding, designing architectures, building and validating prototypes, and taking results out of the lab.
That work produced 16 peer-reviewed papers at leading international venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, ICDCS and DAC, a US patent, €0.7 million in competitive German federal funding for an innovation project, and hands-on security analyses of more than 100 commercial IoT devices.
Selected Works
- DÏoT — Intelligent Security for Connected Devices
- Co-founded a TU Darmstadt start-up project building federated, self-learning security monitoring for IoT devices. I wrote the technical concept and the proposal that won €0.7M in German federal funding, built a team of seven, and took the system from research papers (IEEE ICDCS, USENIX Security) to a product exhibited at Hannover Messe and it-sa.
- ACES — European Edge-Cloud Security Research
- Coordinated TU Darmstadt’s contribution to an eleven-partner European project on secure edge-cloud systems, delivering the security and privacy architecture and a systematisation of container attack and defence mechanisms published at IEEE S&P 2024.
- Security of Federated and Distributed AI
- Poisoning, backdoor, inference and privacy attacks on distributed machine learning, and defences that hold against adaptive attackers who know the defence. Published at USENIX Security, NDSS and IEEE SPW.
- TraceCORONA — Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing
- Led the technical development of a contact-tracing system whose privacy is engineered into the protocol rather than promised in a policy. From cryptographic design to public beta: over 2,000 users in the first month, and a patented verification system.
- Connected-Product Security
- Hands-on security and privacy analysis of a broad range of commercial IoT products: device identification, anomaly detection, secure provisioning and updates, and context-aware authentication and pairing.
Credentials & Recognition
- Dr.-Ing. in Computer ScienceTechnische Universität Darmstadt, 2024
- Patent US 12,335,394 B2Anonymous distributed contact tracing and verification system
- Top Five, AI Startup Competitionhessian.AI, 2023
- First Prize, European Privacy-via-IT-Security App CompetitionMAPPING - for OmniShare, 2016
- Second Prize, National Software AwardVietnam, 2006
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