On Friday, October 2, 2026, Christian Linder, delegate of Helmholtz Information in Brussels, will visit KIT. As part of his visit, the presentation of current research on the Engineering Secure Systems (ESS) topic will be in the focus. As part of the ESS visit, SECUSO will present the NoPhish Concept and Awareness Measures demonstrator at the Karlsruhe Research Factory.

The paper "Accidentally Simulating Manipulation during a Real Election --- but hardly anyone cares?" by Melanie Volkamer, Florian Moser and Tobias Hilt was accepted for presentation at the International Conference for Electronic Voting (EVote ID 2026). The paper discusses a number of problems and communicational errors, which led to discrepancies between the online voting system and the tools to verify the correctness of ones vote during the 2025 GI election. Thereby the GI election 2025 accidentally simulated a manipulation during a real election, which was noticed and reported only by a small number of voters. EVote ID takes place October 6 to 9, 2026 in Tallinn, Estonia. In total, three papers from SECUSO will be presented this year.

Google has been working for some time on new guidelines for Android that will affect the installation of apps outside the Google Play Store in the future. As things stand now, our Privacy Friendly Apps (PFAs) on F-Droid will be affected by these changes no earlier than 2027. Until then, you can continue to install and use our apps as usual via F-Droid. Exactly how these changes will be implemented remains unclear at this point in time. Since our apps on F-Droid are signed directly by F-Droid, it depends on how Google will handle F-Droid in the future. F-Droid is expected to publish further information as soon as it becomes available. We are also monitoring developments and will try to keep you informed in a timely manner should any new changes be announced.

“Cybernation” is a podcast from “Lage der Nation” in which Dr. Alexandra Paulus, Johannes Steger, and Dr. Sven Herpig discuss cybersecurity topics. In the episode from July 28, 2026, the hosts answer questions about cybersecurity, including topics such as data theft, the security of WhatsApp as a messenger service, and how non-experts can assess the privacy friendliness of apps. In this context, the SECUSO research group’s “Privacy Friendly Apps” (PFAs) are recommended, as they do not contain any kind of advertisement or tracking mechanisms, and can be used as privacy-friendly alternatives to more well-known apps.