Welcome at the Chair of Privacy and Security

The scientific staff is standing in front of a valley

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.

News

Bild von Reem Al-Saidi
We welcome Reem as a visiting scientist

We warmly welcome Reem Al-Saidi for her research stay with us. Reem is a researcher at the University of Windsor in Canada, where she is working on the privacy-preserving synthesis of genetic data. Her stay is funded by Mitacs and the KIT Cybersec Graduate School.

We are looking forward to the collaboration!

New Topics for Student Jobs and Theses

There are new topics available in the area of trajectory anonymizatoin for student jobs and theses:

Student Job: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies and Differential Privacy: Algorithm implementation and evaluation

Thesis: A Clustering Trajectory Protection Mechanism with Actual Privacy Guarantees

Thesis: Suppression to Enhance Privacy in Trajectory Data

Overview
Papers accepted at PETS 2024

The papers Fantômas: Understanding Face Anonymization Reversibility (Julian Todt, Simon Hanisch, Thorsten Strufe) and Provable Security for the Onion Routing and Mix Network Packet Format Sphinx (Philip Scherer, Christiane Weis, Thorsten Strufe) have been accepted at PETS 2024. The preprints are available at arXiv: Fantômas & Provable Sphinx Security.

Congratulations!

Study visitors in the KASTEL demonstrator room
Visitors from Brazil

It has been a pleasure to have study visitors from the Brazilian Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) here in Karlsruhe. The visit was part of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and has brought us many interesting discussions!

Paper accepted at ACISP 2024

The paper Pirates: Anonymous Group Calls Over Fully Untrusted Infrastructure (Christoph Coijanovic, Akim Stark, Daniel Schadt, Thorsten Strufe) has been accepted at ACISP 2024!

In this paper the scientists construct a system which allows anonymous group voice calls – even over infrastructure which might be malicious. Their system is the first one to meet the recommendation of a sub-400 millisecond latency.

Congratulations!

Link to the paper
Bild der Gewinnerinnen des FameLab 2024 Regionalentscheids Karlsruhe
Runner-up in the FameLab competition

On April 12, 2024, our researcher Patricia Guerra Balboa has participated in the FameLab competition for science communication with her presentation about Differential Privacy and the anonymization of trajectories. She was awarded the silver medal and the audience price, which earns her an invitation to the national finals in Bielefeld. Congratulations!

(Picture: FameLab Germany: Karlsruhe 2024 © Wissenschaftsbüro Karlsruhe, Foto: Netzoptimisten)

Patricia’s entry (YouTube)

 

Embedding

symbolic picture of a smart city Logo CeTI

Logo of KASTEL