Research-oriented teaching is an important building block for the excellent education at the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden. Students should not only understand concepts, but also work on solving challenging problems at an early stage. In this way, the faculty wants to give its students the opportunity to make a contribution right at the start of their careers.

In his Master's thesis, Alexander Männel is investigating so-called network telescopes, which make it possible to observe the Internet. One of the largest network telescopes is operated by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center of the University of California San Diego. By analyzing the data recorded there, security incidents or misconfigurations on the Internet can be identified and better understood. A very important prerequisite is that the telescope behaves as expected. It is precisely this prerequisite that Master's student Alexander Männel is investigating. The results of his work earned Alexander an invitation from CAIDA to a workshop at UCSD even before he submitted his thesis. The workshop was followed by a one-week research stay to work on transferring his findings into practice. In the long term, his results will improve the operation of network telescopes and make the results based on them more reliable.

The work will be supervised by Jonas Mücke and Prof. Matthias Wählisch at the Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems.

Alexander Männel was already able to present initial preliminary work at the IETF 118 in Prague, funded by the TU Dresden's FOSTER program. He is studying computer science in the Master's program at TU Dresden.