News
ATHENE researchers among finalists of the 9th German IT Security Award
The 10 nominees for the 9th German IT Security Award have been determined. In a multi-stage process, the jury selected the most innovative projects from 54 submitted. Ten concepts made it to the finals. ATHENE scientists are involved in 3 of the 10 submissions. The three winning teams will be announced on November 10 at the end of the Bitkom Cybersecurity Innovation Conference.
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Whitepaper on "Active Cyber Defense"
As a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine, the discussion about active cyber defense has also flared up again. Politicians are calling for improved capabilities. In their white paper "Active Cyber Defense" our CEO Prof. Michael Waidner and our cybersecurity expert Prof. Haya Shulman provide concrete examples of the technical options available for improving cyber defense in Germany.
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ATHENE researchers present document protection with colorful barcode
At this year's it-sa in Nuremberg, Fraunhofe SIT is showcasing DocSeal, a new solution for protecting against document forgery that enables companies and public authorities to quickly and easily add anti-counterfeiting protection to digital and paper documents. For this purpose, a colorful barcode (JAB Code) is printed on the document, which records important document contents and their placement in the document in a tamper-proof manner. An app can then be used to check document authenticity and automatically detect tampering.
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RPKI is insecure - Mechanism for Internet security broken
ATHENE has found a way to break one of the basic mechanisms used to secure Internet traffic. The mechanism, called RPKI, is actually designed to prevent cybercriminals or government attackers from diverting traffic on the Internet. Such redirections are surprisingly common on the Internet, e.g., for espionage or through misconfigurations. The ATHENE scientist team of Prof. Dr. Haya Shulman showed that attackers can completely bypass the security mechanism without the affected network operators being able to detect this. According to analyses by the ATHENE team, popular implementations of RPKI worldwide were vulnerable by early 2021. The team informed the manufacturers, and now presented the findings to the international expert public.
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TrustCerts is winner of the ATHENE Startup Award UP22@it-sa
The winner of this year's ATHENE Startup Award UP22@it-sa has been determined: The startup TrustCerts was able to prevail against nine other startups in yesterday's pitch and may take home the coveted trophy. The team convinced both the jury and the audience with their business idea of signing, creating and managing documents and proofs in a forgery-proof way, while ensuring neutral verifiability with blockchain technology.
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Our researchers present their papers at USENIX 2022
A total of 10 papers in which ATHENE researchers have participated have been accepted at this year's USENIX Security Symposium. Starting today, our researchers will present their papers at this year's hybrid symposium, which is one of the four most important conferences in the field of security.
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Article by ATHENE researchers published in the journal ACM Computing Surveys
The paper "A Survey on Data Augmentation for Text Classification", written as part of the CYWARN, emergenCITY and ATHENE projects by researchers at the Chair of Science and Technology for Security and Peace (PEASEC) at TU Darmstadt, has been published in the journal ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR).
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Client Side Scanning and Deep Perceptual Hashing Vulnerabilities
ATHENE scientists at TU Darmstadt have identified significant vulnerabilities and manipulation possibilities in client-side scanning and deep perceptual hashing. The process came into focus when Apple introduced "NeuralHash" in 2021, a new approach to detecting child abuse imagery, but withdrew the introduction after massive criticism. The research results of the scientists now prove the dangers of client-side scanning methods for users.
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Fragile protection of our communications via submarine cables
ATHENE researchers study states' vulnerability to submarine cable failures
Today, we take it for granted that we can call up a website, stream a movie or be active in social networks within seconds. Many people are often unaware that the data transfer takes place via thousands of kilometers of cable laid at the bottom of the ocean. Today, around 98 percent of international Internet traffic is handled via undersea communication cables. Coastal and island states are highly dependent on this physical infrastructure to provide Internet connections. However, although an annual average of about 100 submarine cable failures of human or natural origin occur, there is currently no global analysis that assesses the vulnerability of individual states to failures on a global scale.
ATHENE scientists Jonas Franken, Thomas Reinhold and Prof. Christian Reuter from the Chair of Science and Technology for Peace and Security (PEASEC) at TU Darmstadt have tackled this issue.
Post by ATHENE researcher on APNIC Blog: Stalloris: RPKI downgrade attack
Cybersecurity expert Prof. Haya Shulman and her team have demonstrated that RPKI deployments in the Internet are vulnerable to downgrade attacks: adversaries can disable RPKI validation exposing networks to BGP prefix hijacks attacks. Haya Shulman describes the findings and conclusions the researchers draw from their attack in her latest blog post on APNIC.
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