News
Data protection-compliant and intuitive management of patient data
As part of the ATHENE project MeDiTwin, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes IGD and SIT are jointly developing innovative solutions for the secure and decentralized storage of medical data in strict compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. The medical digital twins designed by researchers enable fine-grained access control using attribute-based encryption and represent an alternative to centralized cloud storage solutions.
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ATHENE-Paper accepted at the NDSS Symposium
ATHENE researchers, led by Prof Matthias Hollick's team, have conducted a comprehensive security analysis of Apple's satellite protocol and uncovered several vulnerabilities. Their findings are summarised in their paper 'Starshields for iOS: Navigating the Security Cosmos in Satellite Communication'. In a few days, they will present it at the prestigious Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025.
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Prof. Mira Mezini honored as ACM Fellow
Professor Mira Mezini, who represents TU Darmstadt on the ATHENE Board, has been inducted into the circle of ACM Fellows. She is now one of 55 outstanding scientists worldwide to be named an ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2024. This award recognises their groundbreaking contributions to computer science and technology.
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Study "Ethics, law, and security of digital afterlife" published
New technologies such as AI enable people to live on after death in the form of digital representations (avatars) or chatbots. The digital afterlife industry, which offers such possibilities, is developing into a promising growth market. ATHENE researchers in computer science and law at Fraunhofer SIT and the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) at the University of Tübingen have analyzed the technical, legal, and ethical challenges of this development. In their study “Edilife – Ethics, Law, and Security of Digital Afterlife,” they provide a systematic overview of digital afterlife. The study can be downloaded free of charge here: www.sit.fraunhofer.de/edilife-studie.
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New center for applied cyber security research in Heilbronn
On 1 January 2025, Fraunhofer, in cooperation with the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, will open a total of eight research and innovation centers on the Heilbronn education campus. Among them is the Fraunhofer SIT and thus also ATHENE: We are responsible for the new Fraunhofer Heilbronn Research and Innovation Center for Cybersecurity as one of the eight new research and innovation centers and as a new research department within Fraunhofer SIT.
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ATHENE researchers support Hessian LKA with new biometric methods
The digital revolution is constantly presenting law enforcement agencies with new challenges - especially in the sensitive area of combating child pornography. A research team led by ATHENE scientist Prof. Christian Rathgeb from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences has now achieved a major breakthrough: innovative artificial intelligence methods have significantly improved the reliability of biometric facial recognition in children. This development represents an important milestone for the forensic work of the Hessisches Landeskriminalamt (HLKA). The preparatory work for the project was carried out in the ATHENE research area Next Generation Biometrics Systems (NGBS).
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