Interview of Prof. Dr Axel Sikora – WP12 Coordinator

Published on September 1, 2025

Project ASIMUTE is a European multidisciplinary research project that gathers women and men from various walks of life. Their experiences may be different but the people involved in the project are committed to the advancement of science. Let’s learn about their personal paths and motivations through a series of portraits.

For this third installment, Pr. Dr Axel Sikora, WP12 coordinator, accepted to answer our questions.

Axel Sikora

ivESK- Hochschule Offenburg

Question 1: What is your personal path ? What led you to have a scientific career ?

Prof. Sikora: Planning an academic career was not even so much in the focus after having finished my Ph.D. I had a very nice position with one of the leading semiconductor manufacturers, when I ran into an attractive job offering for a professorship, and I felt that I would meet their requirements. And it was merely after having started working in the university again that I understood how enjoyable it is to have the independence to investigate interesting questions of your own choice.

Question 2: Why did you choose this area of research ?

Prof. Sikora: The field of the Intelligent Internet of Things is a super-attractive combination of working with and on very advanced, leading-edge, and challenging technologies, in a so called “enabling technology”, which opens opportunities for an enormous amount of novel applications, and where, consequently and practically speaking, there are enough projects around to finance such research.

Question 3: How is your area of research related to the project ?

Prof. Sikora: We are concentrating on the Intelligent Internet of Things, which encompasses four activities: security, wireless communication, real-time communication, and edge intelligence. In the Asimute project, we are investigating security solutions for the specific wireless solutions that are being used for smart metering applications.

Question 4: What was the initial question you asked yourself at the beginning of the project ?

Prof. Sikora: As a logical continuation of previous project “Smart Meter Inclusif” (SMI), we wanted to extend our research about secure smart metering communication and include Controllable Local Systems (CLS) and submetering, LPWAN solutions and continue our research about remote implementation fingerprinting.

In the Asimute project, there are mainly three questions for us, which build upon one another:

Which technology solutions are being used in France, Germany, and Switzerland ?
How can these technologies and the underlying components be attacked ?
And how can we defend ourselves against such attacks ?

Question 5: Have you answered this question so far?

Prof. Sikora: As in many projects, the answers come as stepwise as the questions are:

We compiled an extended and detailed survey on the technologies in the different regions.
We developed and implemented a good number of attack vectors on the systems and their components.
We are still analyzing these results, before working on the defense strategies.

Question 6: What can you share with us about your current findings without revealing too much?

Prof. Sikora: At first about the used technologies : Indeed, the used technologies and systems, especially in France and in Germany, are very different – also because the regulations and the market structures are so much different. Switzerland is very diverse and comes with very many regional flavors, using combinations of available solutions from Germany and other countries.

With regards to the attacks, we already found in the previous project (SMI) that the systems under attack were impressively stable, so much so that we couldn’t reveal any weaknesses. However, with regards to the analysis of the underlying components (for example of the used security libraries), we found that our fingerprinting approach shows very interesting insights.

The ivESK team, who is working on secure, efficient, and intelligent IoT connectivity solutions

Question 7: When and why did you start working on environment-related projects ?

Prof. Sikora: Oh, this has been many, many years, or, to be more precise, three decades. Environmental monitoring, energy management, and smart metering are key drivers for the Intelligent Internet of Things, so they have been in there since the very beginning of my activities.

Question 8: Lately, have you been working on other environment-related projects ? And, if so, would you mind telling us about their goals and/or results ?

Prof. Sikora: With the intelligent Internet of Things, you can connect each and everything. So, there are very many examples also in the field of environmental monitoring and control, where we help our partners to enable a secure, stable, and efficient connectivity for their environmental applications. Let me give you some examples:

For a manufacturer of large-scale water level monitoring, we developed a wireless mesh network that helped him to enable a flood-monitoring along the Rhine river, where now every node with a distance of a few kilometers is equipped with a low-cost ultra-low power sensor node instead of an expensive and power-hungry cellular (5G) modem.
A similar approach was chosen in another super interesting project with a university partner in Lahore (Pakistan), which has developed a low-cost water flow meter. This flow meter was installed in a water distribution system for small irrigation channels in the Punjab and connected with another – even more optimized – mesh network solution.
But there are also smart city applications in Freiburg, where we collaborated with badenova and their “daughter” company, providata. They had already installed a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) Network and we supported them to develop new sensors for water or heat metering.

It is clear that we can solve the challenges only together, being efficient, sharing results, pushing forward, in the same direction.

Question 9: Why is energy optimization important on a European scale ?

Prof. Sikora: Oh, it is clear that this is important and relevant. Energy is a global need. And, in Europe ,we are so much interconnected and interdependent that we have to take a wider look.

However, what we see are different approaches. Sometimes people use very diverse technologies, sometimes they are very similar, but not identical. You would rather compare this to the different dialects of one language.
It is clear that we can solve the challenges only together, being efficient, sharing results, pushing forward, in the same direction. There is so much to do !

We are happy and lucky, that even as a university, we are part of overall standardization activities for the security of smart metering. So, we hope and believe that our solutions won’t end up as mere paperwork, but will make their way into real-life.

Question 10: Are you excited about other projects, be they yours or somebody else’s ?

Prof. Sikora: Always. There are so many challenges. And there are already a lot of solutions around. I always like the situation, where you sit together with others. And they explain, how they found a clever way of solving one issue. Then you think of other problems where this solution might also be applied.

So, a lot is not only about inventing new solutions, but also about transferring technologies from one problem to another, from one domain to another.