News

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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ATHENE scientist issues new commentary on data protection

Data protection law presented in an comprehensible way – this is what a new commentary on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data protection standards offers. Until now, there has been no work that explicitly addresses not only students and graduates of law, but also those outside the field. This gap has now been closed by the new commentary published by ATHENE researcher Dr. Annika Selzer. The data protection expert has been working intensively on questions of legal and technical data protection for more than ten years. At ATHENE, she leads projects in the research area User-centered Security and Privacy (UCSP).

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AirGuard declares war on stalkers

AirTags are small Bluetooth transmitters from Apple that people can use to quickly and easily find lost items, misplaced keys and bags. But what is intended as a help can also be used to track people unnoticed. Apple itself warns against AirTag stalking. A research-team at the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at TU Darmstadt is conducting research on this topic in ATHENE. Last year, the team published AirGuard, an app that also warns users of Android devices about unwanted AirTag tracking. Now, in a new paper, the researchers use user reports and data donations from 38,000 users to show that the app works well - and even warns faster than the Apple protection mechanism.

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Post by ATHENE researcher on APNIC Blog: Resurrection of injection attacks

In his blog post ATHENE researcher Philipp Jeitner, scientist at Fraunhofer SIT and TU Darmstadt, describes how the Domain Name System (DNS) can be exploited for injection attacks against a variety of different applications. He also shows why countermeasures aren't as easy as to apply patches to vulnerable implementations. A tool to test DNS resolver for vulnerabilities is also linked in the post.

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Optimizing cybersecurity through visual analytics

Six hours without Facebook, Instagram and Co.: For the US-based Meta Inc. this meant losses in the billions. But how do such problems occur and how can they be identified as quickly as possible? ATHENE researchers at Fraunofer IGD have been working on this complex of issues for several years with the goal of making network data more understandable. This will enable more people to assess what is happening in their own network. Current and future possibilities for visual analysis should simplify the work of security experts.

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