Over the years, students have played an important role in the development of eduVPN. Last year we had three students working on various eduVPN improvements. We are very pleased that one of them, Jeroen Wijenbergh, who developed a state machine as the core of eduVPN apps is since end 2022 officially part of the eduVPN core team. With Jeroen’s help we’ll bring the eduVPN apps to a higher level. Jeroen recently helped us releasing a new Linux client, which contains the state-machine he developed during his internship. Currently we are testing a new Windows client which also is based on this state-machine.
You might wonder “what is a state machine?”. A state machine is a model, that describes in which state the app can be. For example, when you use the app the first time, you haven’t logged in, so the app is in a “clean” state and you need to search for your own organisation. A state machine model helps us to define the state of the app in a persistent way. It increases the quality of the eduVPN app by avoiding undefined states. In the future, we would like to have the same state machine model implemented in all the eduVPN apps.
At the beginning of the year, Nick Aquina, a master student of the University of Amsterdam, approached the eduVPN team to discuss if we were interested in a Quantum Secure implementation for WireGuard. WireGuard is one of the underlying VPN technologies supported in eduVPN. This would secure WireGuard traffic against future Quantum Computer attacks. Obviously we are always interested in further improving eduVPN.
Nick had only 4 weeks time to work on his master thesis, which makes it really challenging on such a tough topic. He completely surprised us by not only delivering a thesis report, but also delivering a proof-of-concept Quantum secure eduVPN server and Android client. Wow! We never had a student who delivered so much work in such a short amount of time.
You can read the full report here Quantum secure connection to your institution
For students: we are always open to internships or supervising master research projects. Just contact us!
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