News
ATHENE research on perception manipulation in augmented reality honored at CHI 2025
ATHENE researchers presented their innovative research on “SwitchAR” at the renowned CHI Conference 2025 in Yokohama and received the Jury Honorable Mention Award. The technology, developed as part of the ATHENE project “XR-Guard - A Security Mechanism to Detect and Mitigate Perceptual Manipulations in Extended Reality” under the coordination of Prof. Jan Gugenheimer, enables the application of perceptual manipulations in augmented reality (AR) environments for the first time.
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Successful submission to the S&P
A paper co-authored by ATHENE scientists Dr. Nina Gerber and Dr. Alina Stoever, along with researchers from ETH Zurich, has been accepted for presentation at the prestigious IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). S&P is the foremost forum in which leading international experts from academia and industry can discuss the latest developments in computer security and electronic data protection.
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Study shows: AI systems generate manipulative design patterns without explicit instruction
In their latest study, ATHENE researchers, together with researchers from the University of Glasgow and Humboldt University in Berlin, show that AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude AI automatically integrate manipulative design patterns (dark patterns) into website code. These manipulative elements are implemented even for neutral queries, without the AI systems pointing out the legal or ethical implications.
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UNIDIR report on submarine cables is published: Co-Authored by ATHENE researcher
Subsea fiber-optic cables form the backbone of global digital infrastructure, carrying over 99% of intercontinental data traffic, yet despite their critical importance, they have received limited attention in national and international policy frameworks. A new report by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) addresses this gap through a detailed analysis of various approaches to designating and protecting undersea cables as critical infrastructures. The recently published report "Achieving Depth: Submarine Telecommunications Cables as Critical Infrastructure" was written by ATHENE researcher Jonas Franken (PEASEC/TU Darmstadt) in collaboration with Dr. Camino Kavanagh (King's College London) and Wenting He (UNIDIR).
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Accepted papers at Eurocrypt 2025
At this year's Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Eurocrypt for short - an important conference in the field of cryptography - two papers were accepted with the participation of ATHENE researchers.
The first paper presents new methods for improving authenticated encryption schemes. These methods protect both the confidentiality and the authenticity of data. The second paper introduces a new security model. This can process input from multiple sources simultaneously - an important capability that is lacking in the current Key Derivation Functions (KDFs). KDFs are currently considered the standard for secure Internet communications.