From 2011 to 2020 the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (KASTEL) had been funded as one of three competence centers for cyber security in Germany by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Since 2021, the research is funded by the Helmholtz-Association as the Subtopic “Engineering Secure Systems” (ESS) of the Research Field Information (Key Technologies) of the Helmholtz Association. Of particular importance are the consequences of digitalization in the area of critical infrastructures, for example in the energy economy, in industrial production or networked mobility. ESS bundles the competencies in the field of IT security at the research location Karlsruhe. The goal is to develop a widespread approach instead of isolated partial solutions. The focus will be on comprehensive security in specific application areas, such as power grids or intelligent factories.

The KASTEL research group „Human & Societal Factors“ currently conducts its reseach in the following five areas: (1) IT security awareness measures; (2) design patterns for usable and effective IT security interventions; (3) aspects of GDPR; (4) adaptive and usable authentication; (5) explainablity of ML-based security ratings; and (6) securing democracies.