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.
In our paper BFId: Identity Inference Attacks utilizing Beamforming Feedback Information
(Julian Todt, Felix Morsbach, Thorsten Strufe), we examine how people can be re-identified using Wi-Fi signals. The approach relies on information about the signal disturbance caused by the electromagnetic waves passing through objects, which allows for inferences about the geometry and materials of those objects. Unlike previous approaches which relied on specialized hardware, BFId uses information (Beamforming Feedback Information, BFI) that is sent in plain from all devices connected to a Wi-Fi network back to the router. This allows the BFI to be collected by an adversary easily.
For the paper, we recorded BFI for 197 persons, reaching a re-identification rate of almost 100%. Our dataset is made available for other researchers on request.
The paper will be presented at ACM CCS 2025 in Taipeh and will be available online at October 13, 2025. The KIT also reports in a press statement (DE).
Link to the paperOn September 30th, 2025, Prof. Dr. Héber Hwang Arcolezi of INRIA/École Technologie Supérieure will give a talk here at KIT about Adversarial Perspectives on Local Differential Privacy: Attacks, Auditing, and Protocol Design
. The talk will start at 9:00 in room 252.
We're looking forward to fruitful discussions!
Further informationMartin Lange, who has written his Master's thesis on correlated data in Differential Privacy and published those results together with Patricia Guerra-Balboa, Javier Parra-Arnau and Thorsten Strufe at VLDB 2025, has been given the best-graduation-award for the year 2024/2025 at the Tag der Informatik.
Congratulations on this achievement!
Our chair now officially toots in the Fediverse! The profile @ps@social.kit.edu is our official chair account on the new Mastodon instance of KIT.
We're happy about this pilot project and we're looking forward to its success!
Mastodon profileThe paper Practitioner Motives to Use Different Hyperparameter Optimization Methods
(Niclas Kannengiesser, Niklas Hasebrook, Felix Morsbach, Marc-André Zöller, Jörg K. H. Franke, Marius Lindauer, Frank Hutter, Ali Sunyaev) has been published in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions.
In this paper, practitioners of ML are interviewed to discover why they choose specific model optimization strategies, and what the factors influencing their choices are.
Congratulations!
Link to the paper
