Welcome to the website of the Mathematics for Testing, Reliability and Information Security (MATRIS) Research Group of the SBA Research Competence Center.

MATRIS group was founded to facilitate the connection between discrete mathematics, computer science in general and, in particular, the interplay with information security. The group has positioned itself within SBA Research to serve as a major long-term vision of the center with regard to the successful development of real-world applications as well as necessary for the advancement of theoretical approaches and methodologies.

DEFSYS research programme

We aim to develop a mathematical framework using methods from the field of combinatorial design theory that are needed for problems arising in information security.

CALGO research programme

Our research on discrete mathematics includes the development of combinatorial methods in terms of theoretical construction and analysis of discrete structures as well as related algorithms from the field of combinatorial optimization together with symbolic computation techniques. This will lead to the exploration of new areas for combinatorics and (error-correcting) codes as well as the development of more efficient methods compared to the current state of the art in these research fields.

CST research programme

The utilization of our combinatorial security testing research is expected to generate minimal size test suites and reveal hard to spot errors in an automated way. We thus anticipate that using combinatorial testing to reduce software rework, as an all-around testing methodology for security testing will significantly boost the capabilities of researchers and practitioners working in fault detection and identification of security flaws in various application domains.

Our application-oriented research arising from the CST and CALGO programs positions the group uniquely between academia and industry, particularly in the area of large-scale complex (software and hardware) systems. Existing pioneering applications of our work include but are not limited to:

  • Web & Software Development
  • Security Monitoring and Testing
  • Risk Assessment of Critical Infrastructures
Mission Statement
Develop mathematical foundations and related primitives from the field of discrete mathematics and apply them to real-world problems of software testing and information security.