Welcome at the Chair of Privacy and Security
We work on all aspects of technical data protection and network and IT security. We are primarily interested in privacy, i.e. the protection of individuals against the misuse of their data.
Over the past decades, digital technologies have developed rapidly. The advent of digital transformation and the interconnectivity of all areas of life opens up a wealth of new possibilities. Autonomous networked vehicles, cloud computing, industry 4.0, virtual reality with haptic feedback, online banking or social networks are just a few keywords that are changing the way and quality of life. However, this development also brings with it a number of challenges that people often do not immediately grasp, but which may well conflict with their interests. Our research group is engaged in the development and analysis of security concepts that protect from all types of potential attackers on such systems. We are also interested in the development of technologies that promote data protection in order to protect privacy in the digital world. Finally, we develop protocols and algorithms to secure the underlying infrastructures for communication and computation.
We are part of the KASTEL Security Research Labs, as well as the excellence cluster CeTI, the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop.
On May 17, 2025, the KIT will have its day of the open door together with the Campus day. Our chair will also put up exhibits for display: We will have demonstrators from our Smart-City research, as well as brainwave-based authentication demonstrators. We are looking forward to curios visitors and will be happy to talk about our research in PETs and the importance of privacy in society!
Further informationOur paper Anonymization Techniques for Behavioral Biometric Data: A Survey
(Simon Hanisch, Patricia Arias-Cabarcos, Javier Parra-Arnau, Thorsten Strufe) has been accepted in ACM Computing Surveys. In this paper we classify different anonymization techniques for different kinds of behavioral data (such as voice, gait, hand and face motion). We further find that a lot of existing techniques have been evaluated in a simplistic manner and with weak assumptions for the attacker.
Zusammen mit Jaap-Henk Hoepman (Radboud University/Karlstad University), Seda Gürses (TU Delft), Orla Lynskey (University College London) und Jo Pierson (Hasselt University) organisieren wir das sechste interdisziplinäre Sommerseminar über Privacy. Das Thema dieses Jahr sind die Folgen der Privatisierung von digitalen Diensten im öffentlichen Dienst.
Das Sommerseminar richtet sich an Doktorand:innen (oder Masterstudierende nahe des Abschlusses) der Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaften und Informatik. Betont werden dabei interaktive und fächerübergreifende Gruppenarbeiten.
Die Anmeldung zum Sommerseminar ist offen.
Weitere InformationenPrivacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are considered mandatory in many cases where personal data is processed. However, the adoption of PETs does not seem to follow.. Freek Bomhof of TNO will give the next PET-Talk of the FG PET (special interest group on privacy enhancing technologies of the German Informatics Society) on April 30 where he will share some experience from the practical side of things.
Further informationOur Christoph Coijanovic will give a presentation at the Workshop on Proofs and Proof Techniques for Cryptographic Security (ProTeCS) 2025. The presentation is titled Privacy Proofs for Anonymous Communication Networks
, and the workshop is co-located with EuroCrypt in Madrid.
We're looking forward to interesting discussions!
Prof. Strufe is invited to the 109th conference of the data protection authorities (Datenschutzkonferenz) in Berlin. He gives a talk titled How Anonymizations Fail – Erroneous anonymisations, their evaluation und their desired/claimed protection
. He will also join a panel discussion alongside Dr. Marit Hansen and Prof. Fabian Prasser, where they will discuss approaches for anonymisation, pseudonymisation and different methods to analyse private data.
On Monday, our Shima is going to present our paper, titled A Formal Security Definition for Quantum Private Query and Worst-Case Analysis of the GLM Protocol
(Shima Hassanpour, Marcel Tiepelt, Christoph Coijanovic, Jörn Müller-Quade, Thorsten Strufe) at QCNC 2025 in Nara, Japan!
Quantum mechanics are frequently touted to provide security
in communication or computation, but in this paper we show at the example of PIR that the claimed security achieved this way is far inferior to traditional security notions that are achieved by classical cryptographic primitives.
We congratulate Stephan Escher on his successful PhD defense!
In his thesis, Stephan researches fake news and disinformation in social networks, as well as yellow dots that printers leave on printouts for identification purposes. His research makes appearances on both Wikipedia, and the German television show 1-2-oder-3
.
Congratulations!
The paper A kinematic dataset of locomotion with gait and sit-to-stand movements of young adults
(Simon Hanisch, Loreen Pogrzeba, Evelyn Muschter, Shu-Chen Li, Thorsten Strufe) has been published in Nature Scientific Data. In this paper we present a new motion dataset in which we recorded 50 young adults performing different gait exercises and a sit-to-stand exercise. The dataset was recorded using IMU-suits and will allow new research into anonymizing motion data.
Congratulations!
Link to the paper
