2024 marks the end of an eventful year for SECUSO with many visits and changes in the team. Raphael Morisco joined us as a PostDoc and supervised the “Digital Transformation in Research (DiTrRe)” project, which started at the beginning of 2024. In October, we welcomed Prof. Karen Renaud as a visiting researcher and Bhavana Anna as a new member of our research group. In November and December, Prof. Filipo Sharevski visited the SECUSO research group to continue working on a joint paper on QR code phishing, among other things. We also welcomed numerous guests to our showroom, which we completed at the beginning of 2024. We were also active in the areas of research, teaching and knowledge transfer: a total of 18 scientific publications, particularly on the topics of online voting and phishing, were published this year, a press release on the 40th anniversary of the German e-mail was shared in numerous media, and at the AIK Symposium, which was organized by SECUSO this year, Philipp Matheis and Tobias Länge received the prize for the best thesis. As always, we have summarized all the information in our Christmas leaflet. We hope you enjoy reading it!

The article "The Past Decade of User Deception in Emails and Today's Email Clients' Susceptibility to Phishing Techniques" by Maxime Veit, Oliver Wiese, Fabian Ballreich, Melanie Volkamer, Douglas Engels, and Peter Mayer has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers & Security. The study identifies 23 deception techniques used by phishers in emails, identified through a systematic literature review of publications from the past ten years. Based on this, the susceptibility of current desktop and mobile email clients to these techniques is examined. The results show that all the tested recent email clients remain vulnerable to deception techniques from the past decade. The article also discusses communication problems between developers and researchers, along with suggestions for improving email clients.

E-Vote ID will take place in Nancy, France in the upcoming year. Current contributions from the area of electronic voting can be submitted. In the past years, contributions were welcomed for the tracks "Security, Usability, and Technical Issues", "Governance of E-Voting", "Election and Practical Experiences" track, a PhD Colloquium and a "Poster and Demo Session". Further information and the call for papers for next year's event will be published soon. E-Vote-ID 2025 will take place from October 1 - 3, 2025. Melanie Volkamer supports the conference as General Chair together with David Duenas-Cid, Kozminski University Poland, and Peter Rønne, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Recently, there has been a severe increase in phishing emails claiming to be from internet providers, payment service providers, or banks. It is in particularly critical that the sender addresses often contain the real company name and are only supplemented by additions such as “DOMAIN-secure” or “DOMAINnoreply”. You should therefore pay particular attention and take the time to check both the links and the plausibility of the content carefully before clicking. Information on recognizing fraudulent links and a wide range of training materials are freely available on our website.

In online elections, there is a risk that voters' votes could be changed unnoticed by the voting system due to manipulation or software errors, so that the final result does not correctly reflect the will of the voters. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has now published a study that describes and evaluates the security mechanisms used in online voting systems. The conclusions of the study are that a voting system and its trust assumptions must be considered as a whole in order to fully evaluate its characteristics. Furthermore, the study states that with the current state of technology, it is feasible to implement secret and verifiable vote counting as well as verification of the device. Finally, the study explains the approaches that have already been proposed in research to ensure the secrecy of votes even against quantum computers. The authors of the study are Florian Moser, Johannes Müller, Véronique Cortier, Alexandre Debant, Pierrick Gaudry, Anselme Goetschmann, Ralf Küsters and Melanie Volkamer.

We welcome Bhavana Anna as a new member in the SECUSO team! Bhavana recently graduated with a Master's degree in Cybersecurity from Canisius University in Buffalo, USA in May 2024. Her Master's thesis explored how industry machine learning practitioners understand and perceive security challenges in their applications. Prior to that, she earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from VTU University in India. Since 01.10.2024, she is now part of the SECUSO team as a PhD candidate, investigating security for machine learning practitioners.

On Thursday, 24.10.2024, Anne Hennig was invited to give a guest lecture on the topic “Human What? - The human factor in cybersecurity” as part of the lecture series "Engineering Psychology". The event is organized by Dr. Nina Gerber. Dr. Gerber is a research assistant in the Work and Engineering Psychology research group at TU Darmstadt.

The exhibit "Touch & Learn: Cyber Security Card Games" will be on display at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) until the end of January 2025. Visitors can test their knowledge of recognizing phishing messages and secure passwords. On the interactive play area of a table, statements about fraudulent messages have to be matched. Furthermore, the security of passwords has to be judged. Admission to the ZKM exhibitions is free of charge every Friday from 2 pm.

We have released the latest version of the Privacy Friendly Notes App! There are now many long-awaited functions, such as a dark mode, various sorting options, better checklists and a completely revised home screen. The PFA Notes App is one of the Privacy Friendly Apps for Android developed by the research group SECUSO. All PFAs are available in the Google Play Store and the FDroid Store.

The paper "Webshop Gütesiegel - Perspektive der Nutzer" by Lukas Aldag, Anne Hennig and Melanie Volkamer has been published as open access publication in the journal Datenschutz und Datensicherheit (DuD). The authors investigated what users generally look for when shopping in online stores, what understanding users have of seals of approval and how seals of approval influence purchasing behavior. The results show that although users perceive seals of approval as trust-building factors, their knowledge of seals of approval is rather abstract. It would be important for users to be informed about test criteria and their significance, for example, in order to make informed decisions.

SECUSO member Tobias Hilt successfully applied for the participation of this year's PhD-colloqium at the Ninth International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2024). The goal of the colloquium is to foster the understanding and academic quality of PhD students' contributions in collaboration with senior researchers in the field. Tobias Hilt will present his thesis proposal entitles "Examining Voters’ Ability to Detect Different Types of Vote Manipulation". The colloquium will take place as part of E-Vote ID on October 1st, 2024 in Tarragona, Spain.

On Thursday, September 12, 2024, Melanie Volkamer will speak on the topic of “Wer die Wahl hat...” as part of the KA-IT-Si event, a series of lectures organized by the Karlsruhe IT Security Initiative. Elections must meet numerous requirements: They must be universal, free, equal, direct and secret (Article 38 GG) and it must not be possible to falsify their results. In her talk, Prof. Volkamer will shed light on the security requirements for Internet elections and voting, present practical examples and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their use.

40 years ago, on August 3, 1984, the first e-mail to arrive in Germany reached the then University of Karlsruhe. This was the first time that a connection was established via the Internet between the American network CSNET (Computer Science Net) and the new CSNET server in Karlsruhe. Email has become an integral part of our everyday lives. In 2023, for example, 80% of the population in Germany used email as a means of communication - whether in a business environment, in the education sector or privately. However, cyber criminals also use emails for social engineering attacks, either to obtain sensitive information or to distribute malware. The SECUSO research group has developed numerous materials to raise awareness and train users against Phishing. An overview of the NoPhish concept and the various materials is available on the website.

The paper "Recommendations for Implementing Independent Individual Verification in Internet Voting" by Florian Moser, Rüdiger Grimm, Tobias Hilt, Michael Kirsten, Christoph Niederbudde, and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for publication in the GI Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2024). The paper deals with lessons learned and recommendations for the use of independent tools for individual verifiability in online elections. The findings for this come from an accompanying project that took place during the GI Election 2023. E-Vote-ID 2024 will take place from October 02 - 04, 2024 in Tarragona, Spain.

The paper “Literature Review: Misconceptions about Phishing” by Mattia Mossano and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for presentation at the 18th International Symposium on Human Aspects of Information Security & Assurance (HAISA 2024). The paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of academic publications that analyzed 15 common user misconceptions about phishing. HAISA will take place from July 9 - 11, 2024 in Skövde, Sweden.

On Wednesday, 10.07.2024, members of the "Information" advisory board will visit the SECUSO research group. The visit will include a tour of the HSF real-world lab. HSF stands for the "Human and Societal Factors" research group, in which SECUSO employees are also involved. HSF is part of the subtopic "Methods for Engineering Secure Systems" of the Helmholtz Topic Engineering Secure Systems (ESS), which focuses on answering research questions in the area of human- and law-aligned security. The KASTEL ESS topic is one of the four topics in the EDF (Engineering Digital Futures) program in the Helmholtz Research Field Information. In the HSF real-world lab, various stations are presented where results from the different research areas such as awareness measures, security interventions and AR & VR authentication schemes can be explored.

Benjamin Berens supports the Programme Committee of the 1st Workshop on Societal & User-Centered Privacy in AI (SUPA). The workshop will take place as part of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) on Sunday 11 August 2024. The workshop aims to build a community of experts to exchange ideas and collaborate on research projects on critical issues in the field of user-centred privacy and artificial intelligence.

Raphael Morisco will give a research talk on “The Invisible Threat: Building Awareness of Attacks on ML Algorithms” at the "Dialogtag Wirtschaft und Technologie", organized by the KIT Faculty of Business and Economics. The "Dialogtag" will take place on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 from 15:00 - 19:30 on the KIT Campus South. Participation is only possible on site. The theme of this year's "Dialogtag" is “Openness and Transparency in Economics”. In addition to interesting lectures from science, the program includes a partner fair, project presentations by students and the presentation of the science awards for outstanding doctoral theses.

As part of a bachelor thesis that aims to investigate voters' risk perception with respect to the online voting system used in the 2023 social elections, we are looking for interviewees. Anyone who took part in the social elections and cast their vote online can participate. Registration is via e-mail. More information can be found on the flyer.

This summer semester the lecture Information Security takes place again. This year's lecture will include a guest lecture by Prof. Mathias Fischer on the topic of network security. Prof. Fischer has been Professor for Computer Networks at the University Hamburg since December 2021. Based on the concept of looking at the term information security from different perspectives, Prof. Fischer will speak in his guest lecture about the security of and measures to secure networks through which (user) data is transmitted.

The paper "SMILE4VIP: Intervention to Support Visually Impaired Users Against Phishing" by Mark Bohlender, Raphael Morisco, Mattia Mossano, Thorsten Schwarz, and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for publication at the First Workshop in Accessible Security & Privacy (WASP). The paper present a new tool aimed at supporting visually impaired users' phishing detection, and an initial feedback study of it. The workshop is co-located with the 9th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2024) which will take place in Vienna, Austria, from July 8-12, 2024.

The paper "Is Personalization Worth It? Notifying Blogs about a Privacy Issue Resulting from Poorly Implemented Consent Banners" by Theresa Kriecherbauer, Richard Schwank, Adrian Krauss, Konstantin Neureither, Lian Remme, Melanie Volkamer, and Dominik Herrmann has been accepted for publication at the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2024), which takes place from 30 July to 02 August 2024 in Vienna, Austria. The authors notified websites about the use of website trackers that are set without user consent. The results showed that a personalized approach did not lead to a higher remediation rate than a generic text.

All three German NoPhish videos are now also available with German subtitles. This makes the videos more accessible for our German-speaking users and better supports them to find out about the dangers of phishing messages and how to protect themselves against phishing. The first two videos describe how to check senders and recognize dangerous attachments and links. The third video describes how to keep cool despite stress or time pressure. The videos with subtitles are available on our YouTube channel.

Fraudsters no longer rely on the "grandchild trick" in the hallway, but on nasty tricks online! The three NoPhish videos from the SECUSO research group explain the dangers posed by phishing emails and provide tips on how to recognize phishing emails. Each video explains how users can recognize unsafe senders and dangerous attachments, how users can recognize whether a link is unsafe, and how to keep a cool head even in stressful situations and not let themselves be unsettled. The videos are now also part of the self-learning materials from the Cybersecurity Transfer Center for SMEs (Transferstelle Cybersicherheit für den Mittelstand).

From April 25 to 26, 2024, the German Pre-CHI 2024 will take place at Saarbrücken University. The idea of the event is to provide an opportunity for researchers from Germany and neighboring countries to present their accepted CHI 2024 papers and discuss them in a smaller circle. Benjamin Berens will present the results of his paper "Better Together: The Interplay Between a Phishing Awareness Video and a Link-centric Phishing Support Tool". The Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024) will take place this year from May 11 to 16 on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaii. Registration for CHI is open and the program has already been published.

On April 9, 2024 it's "Identity Management Day" which is a day of awareness to educate business leaders, IT decision makers, and the general public about the importance of identity management. For this, we took a look at related SECUSO research. E.g. the paper "Now I'm a bit angry": Individuals' Awareness, Perception and Responses to Data Breaches that Affected Them - where the authors asked participants in an online survey about their experiences with past data breaches. Furthermore, SECUSO participated in research quantitatively investigating the current state of PasswordManager usage at a large, private university in the US (Why Users (Don't) Use Password Managers at a Large Educational Institution). Most intersting for organisations might be the development of awareness raising materials that contributed to improve password-related security in organisations: On The Systematic Development and Evaluation Of Password Security Awareness-Raising Materials.

Benjamin Berens has successfully defended his doctoral thesis on March 1, 2024. The title of his work is "When Awareness Fades and There Is No Support, the Phisher Has an Easy Game". In his thesis, he analyzes three phishing awareness measures (including refresher) over different periods of time. In addition, the NoPhish video and TORPEDO are compared in terms of increased awareness and also examined as a combination. Congratulations to Benjamin! 

In September 2022, the SECUSO research group was awarded the Federal Consumer Protection Prize ("Bundespreis Verbraucherschutz") by the German Foundation for Consumer Protection (DSV) for developing user-friendly and simple concepts and tools that help users of online services, apps and software to protect their privacy. The money will now be used to translate the NoPhish videos into sign language. The rest of the money will be used to evaluate whether these videos can help deaf people to better recognize phishing messages.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, Prof. Lam and Dr. Gondensen from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore visited Karlsruhe and also paid a visit to the SECUSO research group. Prof. Lam is Associate Vice President for Strategy and Partnerships at NTU. The focus of the visit was on the KASTEL Engineering Secure Systems - HSF Lab. As part of this, SECUSO demonstrated the various topics (e.g. phishing awareness and authentication with AR/VR) of the research group. These included an interactive table with a digital form of the NoPhish Cardgame, the Phishing Master Shooting Game and a station with devices for authentication in VR or AR, e.g. with the Passglobe graphical password procedure.

From October 5 to 10, 2024, the seminar "Trustworthy-Evidence Based Elections" will take place at Schloss Dagstuhl. The seminar is organized by Melanie Volkamer together with Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Corporation), Peter Rønne (University of Luxembourg) and Philip Stark (University of California).

Our SECUSO NoPhish quiz was available on the wir-forschen.digital platform for several months. The project is now finished and the results can be viewed on the platform by logged-in users. In total, the quiz was accessed more than 4000 times. In the area of fraudulent links, most mistakes were made with typos, e.g. mein-paketsrevice.de instead of mein-paketservice.de. These types of phishing tricks are particularly difficult to recognize, as they are based on the fact that people do not read words letter by letter. You should therefore be particularly careful and check the who area of domains carefully. Wir-forschen.digital is a platform on which digital citizen science projects can be created, described and carried out. Interested citizens can register and participate in exciting projects.

Current contributions from the area of accessible security and privacy can be submitted to the 1st Workshop on Accessible Security and Privacy (WASP 2024). Submission deadline will be March 15, 2024. The workshop is co-located with the 9th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2024). All papers will be published by IEEE CS and posted on the IEEE digital libraries. WASP 2024 will take place July 12, 2024 in Vienna, Austria. Mattia Mossano and Maxime Veit support the conference as members of the program commitee.

Current contributions from the area of usable security can be submitted to the European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC) 2024. Contributions have to be registered until May 27, 2024. Submission deadline is May, 31, 2024. As in previous years, EuroUSEC will be an independent event without affiliation to any conference. Accepted contributions will be published as part of the International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS) by ACM. EuroUSEC 2024 will take place September 30 and October 1, 2024 in Karlstad, Sweden. Anne Hennig supports the conference as member of the program commitee.

Secure passwords - even for schoolchildren: Melanie Volkamer spoke to Armin Himmelrath about this topic yesterday, February 7, 2024, on the occasion of the Safer Internet Day in the Campus und Karriere program on Deutschlandfunk (DLF). With increasing digitalization in schools and at home, it is clear that secure passwords are already an issue for elementary school. However, according to Prof. Volkamer, what is missing is not so much the knowledge of what a secure password is, but rather concepts on how to teach the data security in schools and especially in the lower grades. It is important to raise awareness among children to the topic of data security at an early age and to illustrate the topic using concrete usage scenarios for pupils.

The Athene Distinguished Lecture on e-voting by Melanie Volkamer on November 28, 2023 had to be postponed again. The lecture will now be held on November 26, 2024 from 2 to 3 pm. The topic of the lecture will be the risks of black box voting systems and the challenges of end-to-end verifiable voting systems. The focus will be on the challenges related to voter behavior and how to address these challenges through a human-centered approach. Attendance is available in person or online by registration.

The Digilog project, which was completed in October, is about to start its second round. A kick-off workshop was held at the University of Tübingen in November, at which research topics for the second project were presented. On February 15, 2024, a second round of discussions will now take place at the Center for Art and Media (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, ZKM) Karlsruhe with the participation of citizens. The workshop, entitled "Zwischen Risiko und Sicherheit. Wie würden Sie den digitalen Wandel gestalten?" (Between risk and security. How would you shape the digital transformation?) will begin with an introduction at 6 pm. Interested parties are cordially invited to take part in the discussions.

The paper "Systematic Analyses of a Second Device based cast-as-intended Verifiability Approach" by Tobias Hilt, Benjamin Berens, Tomasz Truderung, Margarita Udovychenko, Stephan Neumann, and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting (Voting'24). The paper examines the manipulation detection of various manipulation attempts in online elections with the help of a second, independent device with which the cast vote can be checked. Voting'24 takes place in conjunction with Financial Crypto on March 8, 2024 in Willemstad, Curaçao.

The paper “Exploring Phishing Threats through QR Codes in Naturalistic Settings” by Filipo Sharevski, Mattia Mossano, Maxime Veit, Gunther Schiefer and Melanie Volkamer was also accepted for the Symposium on Usable Security (USEC 2024). This work explores how people behave around QR codes that might contain phishing links in a naturalistic setting. The authors found that 67% of the participants opened the link embedded in the QR code without checking were it leads, and that 52% of participants indicated that the pre-text used (a humanitarian campaign) was the main reason for scanning and accessing the link. USEC 2024 will be held in conjunction with NDSS in San Diego, California.

Next week, Friday, January 26, 2024, we welcome Florian Moser for a guest lecture in the SECUSO Research Seminar. Florian will talk about "Verifying your vote: An experience report from developing and operating an independent second device application". Florian is a PhD student at the Center Inria de l'Université de Lorraine. In his talk, he will present an application that served as second device for online voting in the last election of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI). Florian will present the challenges involved in developing and operating the application and show which issues should be resolved before the next online election. The talk will be held hybrid from 1 to 2 pm and guests are very welcome!

We welcome Raphael Morisco as a new PostDoc in the SECUSO team! Raphael received his doctorate last year in December 2023 at the University of Bielefeld on the topic of media literacy and IT security. In parallel, he worked at the KIT at the Center for Media Learning (ZML): here in various projects (DigiMINT; Eucor; MINTernational innovativ). Prior to that, he worked as a technical editor at an international IT company headquartered in Gütersloh, which is part of the Bertelsmann Group, and for several years in corporate security at one of the two largest confectionery producers in Germany. Since 01.01.2024, he is now part of the SECUSO team as a postdoc and is investigating the effects of the increasing digitalization of scientific work at the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Digital Transformation in Research" (DiTraRe).

As part of the project “Effective Security Awareness at KIT,” the research group will cooperate with the Technical University of Darmstadt in the future. The aim of this cooperation is to develop and evaluate measures to raise awareness among university members in the area of information security.

In the current December issue of the magazine Computer und Recht, you can read our article 'Technische und rechtliche Auseinandersetzung mit Weiterleitungs-URLs in E-Mails aus Marketinggründen' by Maxime Veit, Dirk Müllmann and Melanie Volkamer. The issue will be published on 15 December 2023. The article shows how forwarding URLs for marketing reasons can lead to problems with security awareness measures if they are not used correctly. It also discusses the associated legal challenges and provides recommendations for action. The article complements the article on redirect URLs for security reasons already published in DuD in May 2023.

Research findings are increasingly associated with digitalization processes. This applies to both research methods and their communication in science and society. In four research clusters, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will now study the effects of increasing digitalization of scientific work across various disciplines and develop concrete solutions. The Senate of the Leibniz Association considers DiTraRe a “project of high relevance and transdisciplinary innovative power.”. As part of the project, SECUSO will focus on the topics of security and privacy in the area of digital transformation.

The article "Online-Bundestagswahlen – Verfassungsrechtliche Grenzen und technische Herausforderungen" (Online federal elections - constitutional limits and technical challenges) by Amina Gutjahr, Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann, and Melanie Volkamer has been published in the current issue of the journal Computer und Recht (CR 2023). The article takes an interdisciplinary look at the constitutional requirements of the principles of electoral law and the technical challenges of online federal elections and weighs up the opportunities against the risks. Despite some advantages over postal voting, it harbors great potential for danger and some serious security issues that are difficult to close.

Last week the kick-off for the project "Decision-Making in Hybrid Adaptive Systems for Better Work and Life - An Open Science Approach" took place. The project is funded by the KIT Excellence University Funding Future Fields III. The goal of this Future Fields Stage 3 activity is to lay the groundwork for a long-term coordinated research project (DFG collaborative research center application) on decisionmaking in hybrid adaptive systems. The project will investigate how individuals, teams, and organizations interact with adaptive IT systems in the areas of work and life. In particular, the focus will be on working from home and social media usage in daily life.

TAB Brief Study No. 5 provides an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of e-voting. The Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB) advises parliament and its committees on issues of scientific and technological change. TAB is run by the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) of KIT. In addition to assessing the status quo in Germany and other countries, the focus of this study is on the social and political implications of the introduction of e-voting. For this purpose, experts in the field of e-voting were interviewed, among them Prof. Melanie Volkamer.

We have released updates for some SECUSO Privacy Friendly Apps so that they now support backups using the Privacy Friendly Backup App. All apps where a backup is required now have this support. All of our Privacy Friendly Apps are free and do not require permissions that are not essential for their functionality. They also do not contain advertising or user tracking mechanisms. A list of all apps that support back-ups now can be found here: https://github.com/SecUSo/privacy-friendly-backup#integrated-pfas.

The Athene Distinguished Lecture on e-voting by Melanie Volkamer on November 28, 2023 is postponed. The topic of the lecture will be the risks of black box voting systems and the challenges of end-to-end verifiable voting systems. The focus will be on the challenges related to voter behavior and how to address these challenges through a human-centered approach. The lecture will now be held on February 13, 2024 from 2 to 3 pm. Attendance is available in person or online by registration.

Under the title "Hello, you've got a security problem!", students at the Natural and Engineering Sciences College, an event organized by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation), have been working on the topic of identifying vulnerabilities and notifying affected companies over the past two years. The working group examined poorly implemented IT security and data protection mechanisms, as well as the language used by the providers. Affected companies were then notified to find out if they were aware of the problems and what, if anything, was preventing them from fixing the issues. The last phase of the college came to an end in September. Scientific support for the workshop was provided by Prof. Melanie Volkamer and Prof. Dominik Herrmann, University of Bamberg.

Many people already know that social media platforms collect user data. However, the fact that new technologies can now collect behavioral biometric data such as body movements, hand gestures, eye movements, the human voice, or heartbeats and brain activity in addition to the known data is still largely unexplored. The article "Zu Risiken und Anonymisierungen von Verhaltensbiometrie" (On Risks and Anonymizations of Behavioral Biometrics) by Simon Hanisch, Julian Todt, Melanie Volkamer, and Thorsten Strufe examines what information is contained in biometric data and, which privacy settings are necessary to prohibit or at least anonymize the sharing of these data. The article is published in the book series "Privatheit und Selbsbestimmung in der digitalen Welt" (Privacy and self-determination in the digital world) in the volume "Daten-Fairness in einer globalisierten Welt" (Data fairness in a globalized world).

On September 14, 2023, a discovery tour through Karlsruhe will take place as part of the "Tage der Demokratie" (Days of Democracy), where the KD²Lab can also be visited. The purpose of the discovery tour is to explore places in Karlsruhe that enable citizens to participate in research and get involved. During our discovery tour, the participants will get to know the KD²Lab, Karl9 and the Stiftung Forum Recht. The tour is organized by TRIANGEL Open Space. Please register by e-mail.

On Monday, August 28, 2023, this year's workstreams presented the results of their work in the "Dialog für Cybersicherheit" (Dialogue for Cybersecurity) at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Bonn. Anne Hennig participated for the research group SECUSO in the workstream "UpSchooling", in which teaching materials and approaches to the topic of cybersecurity were developed and further thought out together with students. In the Dialogue for Cybersecurity - project, various actors from civil society as well as from science, culture and media, business and government work on topics relevant to society as a whole in the field of cybersecurity. The next cycle in the project starts in October with the think tank in Frankfurt/Main.

Another SECUSO paper was accepted for E-Vote-ID 2023 in „Track 2: Governance Issues“ and will be published in the Second Proceedings. The paper "Identifying Factors Studied for Voter Trust in E-Voting – A Literature Review“ by Yannick Erb, David Duenas-Cid, and Melanie Volkamer examines which factors potentially influence voter trust in electronic voting (e-voting). Through an analysis of 13 articles from the e-voting field, a total of around 64 potential factors in five categories, ranging from socio-political to technology-related factors, were identified which can influence voter trust either positively, negatively, or in both directions. E-Vote-ID will take place from October 03 to 06, 2023 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Early bird registration is possible until September 10, 2023.

Two SECUSO papers were accepted in the Practitioners Track of E-Vote ID 2023: The paper "German Social Elections in 2023: An Overview and first Analysis" by Tobias Hilt, Oksana Kulyk, and Melanie Volkamer uses a cognitive walkthrough to examine the first German online election, the Social Election 2023. The authors identified some ambiguities and showed potential for improvement. The paper "Voter Perception of Cast-as-Intended Verifiability in the Estonian i-vote protocol" by Tobias Hilt, Kati Sein, Tanel Mällo, Melanie Volkamer, and Jan Willemson used semi-structured interviews to investigate the perception of individual verifiability in online elections in the aftermath of the 2013 parliamentary election in Estonia. E-Vote-ID will take place from October 03 to 06, 2023 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.

Melanie Volkamer was invited as an expert to the expert discussion with the topic "Sichere digitale Teilhabe in der hypervernetzten Welt – Benutzbare IT-Sicherheit" (Secure digital participation in the hyperconnected world - Usable IT security). The expert discussion is organized by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and will take place on Wednesday, September 6, 2023. A central challenge of the increasing digital connectivity is to make this "hyperconnectivity" reliable and secure. Usable IT security is an essential element for this. The aim of the expert discussion with representatives of the scientific community is to identify relevant aspects of future research and development in the area of usable IT security, which can be implemented in the form of a funding program.

The vision paper "What the hack is going on? A first look at how website owners became aware that their website was hacked" by Anne Hennig, Nhu Thi Thanh Vuong and Peter Mayer was accepted for presentation at the European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2023). To gain insight on how website owners became aware of vulnerabilities on their websites, the authors conducted an online survey with 156 website owners. The paper reports on challenges to reach out to website owners as well as first results on how website owners are informed about third party redirects on their websites. EuroUSEC 2023 takes place on October 16 and 17, 2023 at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

On September 15, 2023, the 5th "CyberSicherheitsForum" will take place at the IHK Region Stuttgart and online. The topic of this year's "CyberSicherheitsForum" is "Cyber Resilience". SECUSO will provide information materials and present STAR at the CyberSicherheitsForum. The event is organized by the Ministries of the Interior, Digitalization and Municipalities as well as the Ministry of Economics, Labor and Tourism in Baden-Württemberg, the Cyber Security Agency, the State Criminal Police Office and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Baden-Württemberg as well as the Stuttgart Region Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Registrations will be possible from July 2023 via the event website.

On Tuesday, Jun 13, 2023, Mattia Mossano hold a talk in the seminar of the CyberSec School of KIT. He presented the results of a Phishing study conducted in partnership with IT University of Copenhagen. The study showed how URL formatting (also known as domain highlighting) has little influence on the phishing detection of participants, but that other factors (e.g., hovering time) do show some significant effects. The KIT Graduate School Cyber Security provides doctoral researchers with state-of-the-art technical, scientific, and interdisciplinary skills, enabling them to respond effectively to present and future security challenges. It alos organizes regular networking events like the CyberSec Seminar and serves as a platform for interdisciplinary work and the exchange of ideas among doctoral, post-doctoral, and senior researchers.

The talk "Cybersecurity on the Net - What to do if my company website has been hacked?" has been accepted for presentation at this year's Internet Security Days (ISD 2023). As part of the BMBF-funded research project INSPECTION, websites are found which have third-party redirects to fake shops. This is an indication that third parties could gain unauthorized access to the file system of a website. In the presentation, this problem will be presented, as well as a way to identify the hacking itself. In addition, tips on how to remediate the problem, and protective measures against future hackings are explained. The Internet Security Days are organized annually by the Internet industry association eco and the heise Academy at Phantasialand Brühl and they will take place this year on September 21 and 22, 2023.

The poster "Beware of website hackers: Developing an awareness video to warn for website hacking" by Anne Hennig, Leoni Schmidt-Enke, Miriam Mutter and Peter Mayer has been accepted for presentation at the 19th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2023). The authors describe the development of an awareness video to raise awareness for attacks where hackers place redirects to fake shops in the file system of websites. SOUPS will take place August 6-8, 2023 in Anaheim, CA.

Free, secret, universal and equal elections are the core element of democracies. In many cases the default voting channel is the paper one. However, due to the pandemic, more and more election management boards considered using remote electronic voting systems and several decided to actually offer an electronic voting channel. On November 28, 2023 Melanie Volkamer will discuss risks of black box voting systems as well as challenges of end-to-end verifiable voting schemes in the Athene Distinguished Lectures Series. The focus will be voter behaviour related challenges and how these challenges can be addressed when taking a human centred approach.

The article "Redirect URLs in e-mails" by Dirk Müllmann, Maxime Veit, and Melanie Volkamer, was also published in the current issue of "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" (DuD). For better protection against phishing attacks, links in e-mails can be replaced by "redirect URLs" which, when clicked by the recipient, are checked by a service to see if they point to a known phishing site before the web page is accessed. The paper examines the practical and theoretical, technical and legal implications of such a service.

The article "Cookie use after the TTDSG" by Mark Bohlender, Heike Dietmann, and Melanie Volkamer, was published in the current issue of "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" (DuD). The investigation of the data protection conformity of cookie messages on the most used German websites from the beginning of 2021 was repeated and extended in mid 2022 after the Telecommunications Telemedia Data Protection Act (TTDSG) came into force. The replication showed: The design of cookie messages was more privacy-friendly in 2022. But 84% of the websites already set cookies that were not technically necessary when the page was accessed. These cookie disclaimers are, therefore, not legally compliant.

Submission of papers for this year's European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC) is now open. Contributions for the Research Track, mature work that has been completed, and the Vision Track, work in progress or concrete ideas for work that has yet to begin, must be registered by June 5, 2023. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Proceedings. Oksana Kulyk, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and Farzaneh Karegar, Karlstad University (Sweden), will chair this year's conference. From the SECUSO research group, Anne Hennig will support this year's conference as Publicity Chair, together with Agnieszka Kitkowska, Karlstad University (Sweden), and Ali Farooq, University of Turku (Finland). EuroUSEC 2023 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 16-17, 2023.

On the occasion of the Girls'Day at KIT on April 27, 2023, SECUSO will present security shallenges on the topic "Internet Security - Protect yourself on the Net". In the workshop, participants will learn in exit room style how to recognize fake news and fake websites, and how to protect personal data. We will also show what mistakes one should avoid when creating PINs and passwords, how to encrypt data and make sure, these can only be read by trustworthy people. So join us, let's learn together and overcome these challenges!

Leibniz Science Campuses have the goal to better integrate university and non-university research. The core element is the cooperation between Leibniz institutes and universities or other non-university institutes. With a focus on "Digital Transformation," FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will investigate the effects of the increasing digitalization of scientific work, and develop concrete solutions in an interdisciplinary approach over the next four years. Melanie Volkamer will support the project with a focus on raising awareness of security issues and, for example, pointing out practicable security solutions that can be used to adequately protect sensitive personal data which are collected during research projects.

For the second time the consortium partners and interested parties of the INSPECTION project met in person for a status meeting. This time in the offices of BDO AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft in the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. In the meeting the topic "Hackings with Japanese characters" was presented in the area "Finding", which Mr. Feist from mindup Web & Intelligence GmbH is mainly in charge of. In the area "Treatment", Mr. Halder from BDO AG presented the latest findings from the analysis of log files of hacked websites. Among other things, interesting patterns could be identified how attackers scan websites for vulnerabilities. Anne Hennig from the research group SECUSO presented preliminary results of the notification experiment and gave background information on the development and evaluation of a first awareness video.

The poster "Your website has been hacked - Raising awareness for an invisible problem" by Anne Hennig, Peter Mayer, and Melanie Volkamer was selected for presentation at this year's National Conference on IT Security Research. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) hosted the conference which took place from March 13-15, 2023,  in Berlin. The conference, which was held under the motto "Strengthening the digital society", offered a very diverse program and extensive opportunities for exchange across the entire spectrum of research in the field of IT security.

On Wednesday, March 29, 2023, Anne Hennig will talk about "Cybersecurity on the Web - What to do if my company website has been hacked?" at the 21st Trade Fair for Electrical Engineering, Energy, Buildings and Industry (eltefa). As part of the INSPECTION research project, websites are examined for security vulnerabilities and those affected are informed accordingly. In addition, awareness materials are currently being developed to provide those affected with targeted information on how to rectify problems and take protective measures. First materials will be presented and discussed during the talk.

As part of a study to test an innovative password procedure for the augmented reality glasses Microsoft HoloLens, we are looking for participants. The study will be conducted in the building at Kronenplatz, Kaiserstraße 89 and will take about 30 minutes. Participants will receive an expense allowance of 15€ after successful participation. It is required to read instructions in German. Persons wearing glasses are excluded from participation. However, participation with contact lenses is possible. To register for the study write an e-mail to ar(at)secuso.org or choose an available time-slot from https://terminplaner6.dfn.de/b/7d8a04f2f4ba18be9524e56e86d2a5fb-135831.

Last week, on February 28, 2023, Benjamin Berens presented the topic "Effective Security Awareness" at the 1st conference "Digitaler Alltag in Gefahr?" and discussed the topic "Designing IT security with and for consumers" together with Prof. Kerstin Lemke-Rust (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences) and Dr. Frank Pallas (TU Berlin). The conference was organized by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) together with the Institute for Consumer Informatics at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences and the Consumer Research Competence Center North Rhine-Westphalia of the Verbraucherzentrale NRW e.V..

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary field that is concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and the study of major phenomena surrounding them. To get an overview about research groups that engage in HCI research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a webpage was established to display the different research groups and their areas of expterise.

The poster "Ihre Website wurde gehackt - Awareness schaffen für ein unsichtbares Problem" (Your website was hijacked - Raising awareness for an invisible problem) by Anne Hennig, Peter Mayer, and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for presentation at this year's National Conference on IT security research. The conference is organized by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and will take place in Berlin from March 13 - 15, 2023. The conference is held under the motto "Strengthening the digitally networked society" and serves as a platform for exchange across the entire spectrum of research in the field of IT security.

The Call for Papers for this year's International Conference for Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID9 is out: Submissions for the tracks "Security, Usability, and Technical Issues" as well as "Governance Issues" are due May 15, 2023. Submissions for the track "Election and Practical Experience" as well as the PhD colloquium are due July 10, 2023. And submission for the poster and demo session are due September 15, 2023. The aim of the conference is to bring together e-voting specialists working in academia, politics, government, and industry in order to discuss various aspects of all forms of electronic voting. Peter Rønne will take over from Robert Krimmer and be general chair together with Melanie Volkamer and David Duenas-Cid. Also, this years conference will take place in Luxembourg for the first time, from October 3 - 6, 2023.

It's that time again: Today, February 7, is Safer Internet Day! Since 2004, this day has been used once a year to raise awareness of emerging online issues and current concerns. We took the day as an opportunity to publish the English version of our third NoPhish video. The video presents scenarios in which fraudsters exploit emotions such as stress, time pressure or excitement to steal user data or spread malware. The German version of the video premiered last year for Safer Internet Day.

Changing your passwords regularly is a frequently encountered piece of advice. Especially today on "Change Your Password Day" it is again on many people's lips. The thought behind it seems understandable: First, if the password is changed regularly, it is harder to guess, and second, a password that has fallen into the wrong hands only benefits the attacker until the next time it is changed. But research shows that both recommendations stem from misconceptions: Regularly changed passwords are not harder to guess at all, and regularly changing passwords does not automatically lead to secure passwords. For "Change Your Password Day", we have summarized (well-known) background information.

KASTEL Distinguished Lecture is back: On Thursday, February 9, 2023, Prof. Dr. Dennis Hofheinz from ETH Zurich will be a guest at the KASTEL Distinguished Lecture in Cyber Security. Prof. Hofheinz will speak about "A Personal Perspective on Cryptography." Prof. Hofheinz has been a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich since 2020. Previously, he was a professor at KIT. Prof. Hofheinz works on the foundations of crypthography, and in particular on the design and analysis of cryptographic buliding blocks such as public-key encryption and digital signatures. The event will take place at 4 pm, both online and in presence.

Congratulations to Peter Mayer on his new position as Assistant Professor with a focus on Usable Security! As of January 1, 2023, Dr. Mayer moved to the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Section of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Programming Languages at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Peter Mayer worked as a Research Associate, first at TU Darmstadt and later at KIT, from 2014 to 2019, and as a PostDoc at KIT for the SECUSO research group until 2022. Joint research activities will continue to connect Dr. Mayer with KIT and the research group in the future. 

Im Projekt TrusD (Trust Indicators in the digital World) haben Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer, Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche und Lukas Aldag erforscht, anhand welcher Indikatoren Menschen beurteilen, ob Informationen und Dienste online vertrauenswürdig sind. Da nach wie vor viele Nutzer:innen Probleme damit haben, zum Beispiel betrügerische Webadressen zu erkennen, gehörten auch Aufklärungsmaßnahmen wie die „Bunte Nacht der Digitalisierung“ zum Projekt. TrusD ist Teil des Forschungsverbunds digilog@bw, für dessen Blog Lukas Aldag in einem fünfminütigen Video die Ergebnisse des Projekts zusammengefasst hat.

2022 was an eventful year: from strict Corona rules, to many relaxations but at the same time new problems due to the Ukraine war. Nevertheless, we at SECUSO tried to make the best out of the situation and continued to research how to make security measures usable for citizens. In addition to exciting research results, there have also been some changes in the team and among the alumni. We also welcomed interesting guests in our Research Seminar and the KASTEL Distinguished Lecture Series, and presented our research results at various events. We summarized all information in our Christmas greetings. We hope you enjoy reading it!

Since a few month, the SECUSO NoPhish Quiz can be found on the wir-forschen.digital platform. The quiz has been started at least 1000 times since we launched it on the platform. Wir-forschen.digital is a platform on which Digital Citizen Science projects can be created, described and conducted. The platform is a central result of the project project wir-forschen.digital: Wellbeing@Home, which will come to an end at teh end of the year.

At the end of the year, the Digital Citizen Science project wir-forschen.digital: Wellbeing@Home comes to an end. It was funded by the Excellence Initiative. Over the past two years, various sub-projects have developed tools and methods for Digital Citizen Science with which we want to enable and promote the active and comprehensive involvement of citizens in scientific projects. The central result of the project is the wir-forschen.digital platform, on which Digital Citizen Science projects can be created, described and conducted.

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin... For this year's December we created a SECUSO advent calender. Every day we will open a little door and present you some of our awareness and training materials. NoPhish, protection of user accounts with secure passwords or Privacy Friendly Apps - we will talk about a little of everything. Follow us on Twitter or Mastodon, so you won't miss anything!

This year, the research group SECUSO presented part of the materials from the NoPhish concept at the Hannover Messe. Among them were the online game Phishing Master and the NoPhish-Quiz, which was presented by STAR, the Security Teaching & Awareness Robot of the research group. Both methods were presented again in detail by Science Square. Science Square is the Speakers' Corner on research and applied science in the "Research & Technology" area of Hannover Messe. The aim of the initiative is to present exhibits and the latest results from science in a generally understandable dialog.

The results of the first cycle in the project "Dialog für Cybersicherheit" (Dialogue for Cybersecurity) are now also avalilable for workstream 4 on effective IT security awareness measures. Workstream 4 was supported by Melanie Volkamer (SECUSO) and Angela Sasse (Ruhr University Bochum). The goal of this workstream was to develop guidelines for creating effective awareness measures. Within the project, which is organized by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), representatives from society entered the dialogue with different stakeholders from academia, culture and media, economy as well as politics.

The poster “The Phishing Master Anti-Phishing Game" by Heike Dietmann, Tobias Länge, Philipp Matheis, Aleksandra Pawelek, Benjamin Berens, Mattia Mossano, Maxime Veit, Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for presentation at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2022). The authors will present a publicly available anti-phishing game. In a first study the authors gathered feedback from participants. In general, the response was uniformly positive which makes the antiphishing game a good alternative to estblished anti-phishing materials. ACSAC 2022 will take place in Austin, Texas, from December 5 to 9, 2022.

About half of the German companies have already become victims of cyberattacks and also the IT infrastructure of KIT is constantly exposed to cyberattacks of various kinds. In the current November issue of the employee magazine "KITdialog", the project "Effective Security Awareness at KIT" is presented, in which a mandatory online training for KIT employees is developed and evaluated. The research group SECUSO as well as the KIT Information Security Officer (Philipp Bunten) and the SCC, in particular the departments IT Security and Service Management as well as KIT-CERT with the support of the body of IT experts are responsible for the project.

Read the article

We welcome Tobias Länge and Philipp Matheis as new research assistants in our SECUSO team! Tobias and Philipp supported the research group SECUSO since May 2022 as student assistants. Tobias was mainly working in the development of the Privacy Friendly Apps (PFA). Philipp mainly supported the group in conducting AR and VR studies. Both graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science at KIT and are supporting SECUSO since November 1, 2022 in the development of the Privacy Friendly Apps and the development of authentication schemes for VR and AR as well as in further projects.

Dr. Karen Renaud will accompany the SECUSO research group as KIT International Fellow until November 30, 2022. The visit was already planned for 2021 and had to be postponed several times. Dr. Karen Renaud is Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her research focuses on human-centred security. She is interested in the interplay between users and security in the context of societal and industrial use. Dr. Renaud has has done fundamental work in understanding people’s mental models of security in a variety of applications and contexts.

The number of our Privacy Friendly Apps has increased significantly over time. At the same time, the effort required to maintain the apps became very high. Unfortunately, the resources of our research group are currently no longer sufficient to keep all apps functional at the same time. In order to be able to provide proper support, we will be removing some apps from the Play Store as well as F-droid in the coming days. These include the following apps: Weather, Pedometer, Net Monitor, WiFi Manager and Werewolf app. The source code of the apps will still be available on GitHub. Interested users can still download the app from GitHub to use them. We are always happy to hear if someone likes to take over the maintenance of the apps as part of a mentorship.

Info about the mentorship

SMILE-4-VIP was among the five concepts nominated for this year's NEO Innovation Award. The award ceremony took place on October 21, 2022 in the Stadthalle Ettlingen. SMILE-4-VIP helps people with high visual impairment and blindness to detect phishing emails. The program combines phishing research with the working techniques of vision-impaired people in dealing with emails. SMILE-4-VIP is an extension for the most popular email clients and enriches the emails there with hints in case of danger. The NEO Innovation Prize, which is awarded by TechnologieRegion Karlsruhe GmbH, is intended to highlight and reward innovative solutions from various areas of cyber security.

On the 13. of October the DigiLog project came to an end, with an event at the "Zentrum für Kunst und Medien" in Karlsruhe. Several results were presented, with a subsequent discussion. A panel discussion took place, considering the current digital situation in Germany, as well as the problems and perspectives the different studies revealed. We presented our topic TrustD (trust indicators in the digital world) with a video, which will be made available shortly (German only). More information about our topic TrustD or one of the other interesting topics can be found on the official website.

The Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote ID 2022) took place in Bregenz, Austria, from October 4 to 7. With 168 participants from all continents of the world, the number of participants in 2021 could not quite be reached. But the conference itself offered many highlights and great backdrops for photos. The conference was organized by Melanie Volkamer, SECUSO, Robert Krimmer, University of Tartu, Estonia, and David Duenas-Cid, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. Next year, E-Vote-ID will be held in Luxembourg.

From September 29 to 30, the European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2022) took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. With nearly 40 participants on-site and 15 participants online, this year's conference was characterized by face-to-face exchanges and conversations. The conference was organized by Oksana Kulyk, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Karen Renaud, University of Strathclyde, UK. Melanie Volkamer and Peter Mayer supported the organization on site. Anne Hennig accompanied the conference as Publicity Co-Chair. Next year EuroUSEC will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The SECUSO research group received the Federal Consumer Protection Award from the German Consumer Protection Foundation (“Deutsche Stiftung Verbraucherschutz”, DSV)! The prize is awarded for the development of user-friendly and simple concepts and tools that help users of online services, apps and software to protect their privacy and data security. The prize is awarded by the foundation of the Federation of German Consumer Organizations to outstanding consumer protection projects. The prize was awarded on Monday, September 26, 2022, in Berlin. Dr. Peter Mayer accepted the award on behalf of the research group.

On October 26 and 27, 2022, Melanie Volkamer will give a presentation at the SWITCH Security Awareness Day 2022 (SSAD) and the Swiss Website Security Day 2022 (SWSD). At SSAD, the topic “Phishing Training without Phishing Simulation” will be discussed. The SWITCH Security Awareness Day aims at giving some insights into the different possible ways to deal with Security Awareness while pointing out where to get support and what is most crucial for being successful. For the Swiss Website Security Day, Melanie Volkamer will present the INSPECTION project. The one-day event will address current security issues for Swiss registrars and webhosters.

More than 40 participants have already registered for this year's European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2022). In order to give those who decide to attend at short notice the opportunity to participate, the registration period has been extended: Registration for in-person participation is still possible until Thursday, September 22, 2022. Registration for online participation is still possible until one day before the conference starts, Wednesday, September 28, 2022. For all those who want to have a look at the program already: The proceedings for EuroUSEC 2022 are available now!

We found a security design flaw in the QR scanner on the Google Pixel and were able to communicate it to Google and the BSI. The newest update of the Android system (Android 13) also changed the QR scanner UI and fixed the security breach. The problem, the QR scanner did not present the domain of an URL at a certain length of the link. The earlier representation potentially enabled an attacker to let the user see anything, but the domain, without the possibility to check for the actual domain. Don’t forget to update your Google Pixel, to ensure you have the newest security updates.

For more information you can read a short summary (german only).

We congratulate Dr. Jurlind Budurushi on his new position as lecturer! Jurlind Budurushi was part of the SECUSO research group from 2012 to 2016. He earned his PhD at TU Darmstadt and worked as a PostDoc for SECUSO until December 2016. He then worked several years in industry. Since August 2022, Jurlind Budurushi is working as lecturer and researcher in the department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Qatar University in Doha.  

This year, the SECUSO research group won the Digital Autonomy Award for it’s Privacy Friendly Apps. On the occasion of Mensch und Computer (MUC) 2022 conference in Darmstadt, SECUSO presented the Privacy Friendly Apps (PFA). Guests were able to test the PFA and inform themselves about the apps. At the end of the event, the PFA team was congratulated on their award during the awards ceremony. In 2022, the Digital Autonomy Hub awarded the Digital Autonomy Award for the first time to the SECUSO PFAs to honor their contribution to increase the digital autonomy of users.

The program for this year's European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2022) has been published. The conference will be held as a hybrid event in Karlsruhe, Germany on September 29 and 30. The conference is organized by Oksana Kulyk, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Karen Renaud, University of Strathclyde, UK. Melanie Volkamer and Peter Mayer support the program committee as local chairs in Karlsruhe. Anne Hennig supports the conference as Publicity Co-Chair. Registration for EuroUSEC is now open!

The paper “Council of Europe Guidelines on the use of ICT in electoral processes" von Ardita Driza Maurer, Melanie Volkamer und Robert Krimmer was accepted for publication at the 1st International Workshop on Election Infrastructure Security (EIS 2022). The authors report on the development of guidelines by the Council of Europe for election technology. EIS 2022 will take place in conjunction with the 27th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2022) in Copenhagen, Denmark, from September 26 to 30, 2022.

Peter Mayer has returned to Karlsruhe from his research visit at the George Washington University Usable Security and Privacy Lab (GWUSEC), the research group of Prof. Adam J. Aviv at the George Washington University. The research visit was funded by a travel grant of the topic Engineering Secure Systems, subtopic 46.23.01 Methods for Engineering Secure Systems, of the Helmholtz Association (HGF).

The paper “Why is Online Voting Still Largely a Black Box?" von Michael Kirsten, Melanie Volkamer and Bernhard Becker was accepted for publication at the 1st International Workshop on Election Infrastructure Security (EIS 2022). The authors interviewed experts and stakeholders about why online voting is still a largely an obscure process. EIS 2022 will take place in conjunction with the 27th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2022) in Copenhagen, Denmark, from September 26 to 30, 2022.

Our NoPhish concept is growing and growing. Therefore we have created a detailed summary of the concept and its measures. Here we explain the components of the concept and briefly present all 10 measures so far, from the flyer to the humanoid robot (STAR). We also provide insights into which events we have participated in with our material so far in the past. Also some numbers about the current usage of our material can be found in this summary. In addition we list the current research from publications to theses.

The paper “Why Users (Don't) Use Password Managers at a Large Educational Institution" von Peter Mayer, Collins Munyendo, Michelle Mazurek und Adam J. Aviv was accepted for publication at the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2022). The authors surveyed 277 faculty, staff, and students about their use of password managers. They found that the largest factor encouraging PM adoption is perceived ease-of-use, indicating that communication and institutional campaigns should focus more on usability factors. USENIX Security will take place as a hybride on-site event in Boston, MA, USA, from August 10 to 12, 2022.

The paper “Individual Verifiability with Return Codes: Manipulation Detection Efficacy” by Paul Tim Thürwächter, Melanie Volkamer and Oksana Kulyk was accepted for publication in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) proceedings at the 7th International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2022). The goal of the study was to find out if the Manipulation Detection Rate during online votings can be increased if the voters watch an information video beforehand. In the video it was explained which steps are necessary for the voting process and individual verifiability. The results indicate that rather than only explaining the voting process, it might be better to raise awareness for verifiability. E-Vote-ID will take place as a hybrid on-site event in Bregenz, Austria, from October 4 to 7, 2022.

The poster “PassSec+ - An add-on that protects your passwords, payment data and privacy” by Maxime Veit and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for presentation at the Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022). To support users in detecting untrustworthy websites more efficient and more effective we developed the PassSec+ concept and a corresponding browser add-on in 2015. We recently revisited this approach and noticed some shortcomings. The poster present how we addressed these shortcomings and how we adopted the logic as well as the user interfaces. SOUPS will take place as a hybride on-site event in Boston, MA, USA, from August 7 to 9, 2022.

On July 21, 2022 the Colloquium Fundamentale will discuss the topic of “Politik in der Wissenschaft. Vom Zweck der Forschung in modernen Gesellschaften“ (Politics in science. The purpose of research in modern societies). The relationship between politics and science is often described as strained. Representatives from the government and the university will discuss how freedom of science has to be understood to guarantee an appropriate relationship between science and politics. This last session of the Colloquium Fundamentale will take place in the foyer of the “Präsidiumsgebäude” at KIT from 6 to 7.30 pm. 

TORPEDO (Tooltip-poweRed Phishing Email DetectiOn) is an add-on to help users detect fraudulent emails with dangerous links (often called phishing emails). NEW: We have included a small loader. This is to help ensure that no artifacts are visible while creating tooltips on low performance devices. The update is available for the web extension e.g. for Firefox or Chrome, as well as for the Thunderbird version of TORPEDO. 

The poster “‘Now I'm a bit angry:' Individuals' Awareness, Perception, and Responses to Data Breaches that Affected Them" by Peter Mayer, Yixin Zou, Florian Schaub, and Adam J. Aviv was accepted for the presentation at the 18th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022). In the first known study to ask participants about actual data breaches that impacted them, the researchers found that people were not aware of 74% of the breaches shown to them. The researchers also found that most of those affected by breaches blamed their own personal behaviours for being affected. The full paper describing this study was presented at last year’s USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2021). SOUPS will take place as a hybride on-site event in Boston, MA, USA, from August 7 to 9, 2022.

Prof. Hanselka congratulated Prof. Melanie Volkamer, Dr. Peter Mayer and Reyhan Düzgün on receiving a Facebook Research Award. The Research Award was given by Facebook for exploratory research work on the topic "Trust in AR, VR, and Smart Devices". The project submitted by the SECUSO team entitled "Secure and usable authentication for augmented and virtual reality devices" was chosen for the award. Reyhan Düzgün, doctoral student in the SECUSO research group, received the distinction from the president of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Prof. Dr. Hanselka, on behalf of the entire team at the President's Banquet.

On Tuesday, June 28 2022, nearly two years after the INSPECTION project started with the Kick-off meeting in Karlsruhe, all partners and interested persons met again (partially) in person for the fifth project meeting. Joachim Feist, mindUp Web + Intelligence GmbH, talked about the advantages of a security.txt on websites. Stephan Halder, BDO AG, presented further results from forensic analyses of websites. Dr. Peter Mayer and Anne Hennig, who represent the SECUSO research group in the project, presented first results of a notification experiment, where the effectiveness of several notification texts is compared. In the following months, the focus of the project will be on awareness. Therefore, Prof. Melanie Volkamer presented guidelines on how to develop security awareness materials. 

Notifications for accepted papers to be presented at this year's International Conference for Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2022) were sent out last Friday. Based on the PC members’ reviews and discussion, 19 papers are selected. Roughly half of the papers are accepted for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) proceedings and the other ones for publication in the University of Tartu’s proceedings. As a novelty, all papers in E-Vote-ID will be open access, including the ones in Springer LNCS. The conference will take place as a hybrid event from October 4 - 7, 2022 in Bregenz, Austria. Congratulations to all authors!

The Karlsruhe “Bunte Nacht der Digitalisierung” (“Digital Night”) will take place on Friday, July 1, 2022. The SECUSO research group will participate in this event with a quiz on phishing URLs. Furthermore, visitors will be able to watch our NoPhish videos and learn more about how to recognize fraudulent messages. All quiz-participants can take part in a raffle: We give away 2 x 50€ and 2 x 30€ in gift cards. So come and meet us on July 1, 2022 in the Triangel Open Space, Kaiserstraße 93, Karlsruhe!

Watch out! Cybercriminlas want to obtain your private data or access your user accounts. At the Digitaltag 2022, the SECUSO research group will introduce you to tipps and tricks of cybercriminals. With our course on Digital Self Defense, we will show you how to detect fraudsters. The workshop will take place online. There is no registration needed for your participation.

The paper “SoK: A Systematic Literature Review of Knowledge-Based Authentication on Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Displays” by Reyhan Düzgün, Naheem Noah, Peter Mayer, Sanchari Das and Melanie Volkamer as well as “Cookie Disclaimers: Impact of Design and Users’ Attitude” by Benjamin Maximilian Berens, Heike Dietmann, Chiara Krisam, Oksana Kulyk and Melanie Volkamer were accepted at the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2022). The conference will take place in Vienna from 23th-28th of August 2022.

This year the SECUSO research group was able to exhibit parts of the materials from the NoPhish concept at the Hannover Messe. The exhibits included the NoPhish Quiz, the online game Phishing Master and STAR, the Security Teaching & Awareness Robot of the research group, who welcomed the president of the KIT, Prof. Hanselka, as well as German chancellor Olaf Scholz and his team at the official opening of the Hannover Messe 2022. All materials are designed to train users in recognizing fraudulent messages. Each of the exhibited formats is interactive and targeted to engage different target groups.

Submission to the tracks 3 “Election and Practical Experiences” and 5 “PhD Colloquium” can be made until July 10, 2022. Track 3 welcomes reviews of developments in the area of applied electronic voting and reports on experiences with electronic voting or the preparation thereof. Track 5 welcomes research proposals in the form of an extended draft. One of E-Vote-ID’s major objectives is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary and open discussion of all issues related to electronic voting (including, but not limited to, polling stations, kiosks, ballot scanners, and Internet voting). The conference will take place October 4 to 9 in Bregenz, Austria.

The paper “Your Cookie Disclaimer is not in line with the ideas of the GDPR. Why?” by Anne Hennig, Heike Dietmann, Franz Lehr, Miriam Mutter, Melanie Volkamer and Peter Mayer was accepted at the 16th International Symposium on Human Aspects of Information Security & Assurance (HAISA 2022). The paper reports about a study where the data protection officers of 150 German websites were asked about (potential) GDPR non-compliant cookie disclaimers on their websites. The conference will take place in Mytilene, Greece on July 6 and 7, 2022.

Our SECUSO research team is growing! We are offering a research associate position at the earliest possible date. You will conduct research in the field of Human Factors in Security & Privacy. For our interdisciplinary team we are looking for researchers with a degree in computer science, business informatics, media informatics, industrial engineering, mathematics, communication sciences, psychology, or related areas. Programming experience and experience in conducting qualitative and quantitative studies is an advantage. The position is suitable for PhD candidates as well as PostDocs. Salary category 13 TvÖD is intended.

STAR, the Security Teaching & Awareness Robot of the SECUSO research group, will accompany us to the Hannover Messe, which will start next week. At the Hannover Messe, the research group will present parts of the NoPhish materials, which were developed by SECUSO. With the help of NoPhish, users can learn to detect fraudulent e-mails and other messages and protect themselves against phishing. Recognizing fraudulent messages can be trained with START this year at the Hannover Messe. Visit us from May 30 to June 2, 2022 in the Future Hub, hall 2, Stand B40!

Dr. Peter Mayer and Anne Hennig presented the research project INSPECTION as part of the internal event series “DVS Open” at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) on May 17, 2022. “DVS” is the German abbreviation for digital consumer protection (“Digitaler Verbraucherschutz”). Peter Mayer and Anne Hennig presented the goals and current research results of the INSPECTION project. The goal of the project is to identify hacked websites, inform affected website owners about the security vulnerability and raise awareness for the problem to minimize the risk of future attacks.

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, Melanie Volkamer presented the results of workstream 4 (effective IT security awareness measures) of the project “Dialog für Cyber-Sicherheit” (Dialogue for cybersecurity). Within the project, which is organized by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), representatives from society entered the dialogue with different stakeholders from academia, culture and media, economy as well as politics. Within five “workstreams”, different topics were discussed. Workstream 4 was supported by Melanie Volkamer (SECUSO) and Angela Sasse (Ruhr University Bochum). The goal of this workstream was to develop guidelines for creating effective awareness measures.

Benjamin Berens has joined the program committee of the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2022) this year. The conference will be held August 23-26, 2022 in Vienna, Austria. Authors will be notified of accepted papers by May 16, 2022.

We will provide another workshop for the Digitaltag 2022. The workshop will be held online on 24.06.2022. The topic will be phishing methods and how to detect phishing emails. 

Fraudulent messages come as emails or in other forms. With the help of the NoPhish concept developed by the SECUSO research group of KIT, users can detect them and protect themselves. At the Hannover Messe, the research group will present parts of the NoPhish materials with the help of interactive exhibits. Visit us from May 30 to June 2, 2022 in the Future Hub, hall 2, Stand B40!

The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has now published the information that the SECUSO research group has won the Digital Autonomy Award for its Privacy Friendly Apps. The topic was also published in several news media, for example the “Badische Neueste Nachrichten” (BNN), the “Tagesspiegel” (paywall) or the online magazine “Gründermetropole”.

On Thursday, May 5, 2022, the research groups Security-Usability-Society (SECUSO) and IT Security (PS) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology will organize a cybersecurity course as fundraising event for Ukraine. The course will be from 7 to 8 pm CEST. It is free of charge, but attendees are asked to make an adequate donation for the Ukraine (e.g. Aktion Deutschland Hilft e.V. DE62 3702 0500 0000 1020 30). The course will cover the detection of phishing emails and other fraudulent messages as well as the detection of fake news, for example in Social Media. The course will be held as an online event.

Many employees and companies will continue to be open to working from home in the future - regardless of the Corona pandemic. In fact, they often prefer it to working in the office. However, working from home brings numerous advantages as well as challenges. The "wir-forschen.digital" initiative of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) invites citizens to submit their personal challenges for which they would like support from science at wir-forschen.digital/home-office/. Proposed solutions are then developed together with researchers and students.

Anne Hennig, research assistant with the SECUSO research group, and Joachim Feist, mindUp Web and Intelligence GmbH, presented the INSPECTION project to the IT security commissioners of the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHK) on March 29, 2022. The aim of the INSPECTION project is to find hacked websites and effectively notify the website owners about the vulnerability on their website. To design an effective notification process, it is important to raise awareness for the problem among different stakeholders.

On Thursday March 31, 2022, Mattia Mossano from the SECUSO research group will hold a talk at the “Deutsche Flugsicherung” (DFS) on “Security and Privacy for everyone”. Nowadays we are constantly connected to the rest of the world. However, all this connectivity comes with risks to both the security of our data and our privacy. In his talk, Mattia Mossano will present an overview of some of the current threats and propose ways to protect oneself.

The paper "Standing out among the daily spam: How to catch website owners attention by means of vulnerability notifications" by Anne Hennig, Fabian Neusser, Aleksandra Pawelek, Dominik Herrmann and Peter Mayer has been accepted for publication at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022), which will be held April 30 to May 5, 2022 in New Orleans, LA, USA. The paper describes an interview study with German website owners to identify ways to effectively notify them about website vulnerabilities.

We invite you to submit a paper and join us at EuroUSEC 2022, which will be held as a hybrid on-site event on September 29 & 30, 2022 in Karlsruhe. Original work describing research, visions, or experiences in all areas of usable security and privacy are welcomed. Paper registration deadline is June 6, 2022. Prof. Melanie Volkamer and Dr. Peter Mayer, Steering Committee, and Anne Hennig, Publicity Co-Chair, will represent SECUSO as part of the event.

On November 25, 2021, Dr. Karen Renaud held a talk as part of the KIT International Excellence Talks. The title of her talk was “Moving from ‘Human as Problem’ to ‘Human as Solution’ in Cyber Security”. The video of the talk is now online on the KIT YouTube channel. Dr. Karen Renaud will be a KIT International Fellow 2021 with the SECUSO research group.

With the app of the State Data Protection Officer in Baden-Wurttemberg (LfDI), users can, for example, retrieve content of the office on Mastodon, the LfDI website and on podcasts. The iPhone version of the app was released in September 2021 and is now available for Android smartphones as well. The Android app was developed by the SECUSO research group, after Dr. Stefan Brink got notice of the research group’s Privacy Friendly Apps. Christopher Beckmann and Noah Schlegl were mainly responsible for the development of the Android App.

Last Wednesday, March 2, 2022, Melanie Volkamer was invited as a guest speaker on the Telekom stage at the Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona. The title of the discussion was “Secure your success - it’s a CXO topic”. Prof. Volkamer discussed together with Naby Diaw, CISO Lufthansa, and Thomas Tschersich, CSO Deutsche Telekom, the current threat situation from a scientific perspective and what the responsibility of the executive level is in protecting the business from cyber risks.

We have adapted the functionality/logic and the user interfaces of PassSec+ to be inline with those of TORPEDO. This is part of our activities in the Helmholtz topic Engineering Secure Systems. Since we no longer classify an Extended Validation Certificate as low risk (analogous to the decision of the web browser), this means that some pages (especially from banks) are no longer included directly as low risk, but as unknown risk.

In episode 16 of the Security Awareness Insider podcast is Melanie Volkamer discussing the sense and nonsense of simulated phishing campaigns with Katja Dörlemann, SWITCH, and Markus Beyer. Simulated phishing campaigns promise to be an all-round carefree solution. But this is a false conclusion and simulated phishing campaigns can even harm companies rather than helping them, explains Melanie Volkamer in the podcast.

Melanie Volkamer talked to Dirk Arendt, Head of Government & Public at Trend Micro, about IT security in companies at a virtual coffee break on October 7th. The topic of the talk was “Security measures are most effective when everyone is on board - but how to raise awareness for the topic among the employees?”. The talk was recorded and the video is now online.

The Privacy Friendly Apps (PFA) which were developed by the SECUSO research group were nominated for the Digital Autonomy Award. If you also think that our apps should win the race, vote for the Privacy Friendly Apps in the open online voting. Voting is possible until February 18. So, hurry on, open the link and with a view clicks your vote has been casted!

Today is Safer Internet Day 2022! The SECUSO research group is participating in the event with various contributions about a safer Internet: We gathered information on how to find out if your website is hacked in our INSPECTION FAQs. Melanie Volkamer and Peter Mayer present new research on the topic of authentication methods for kids in an expert letter. But above all: Our new NoPhish video will premiere today! 

The paper "Phishing awareness and education – When to best remind?" by Benjamin Maximilian Berens, Katerina Dimitrova, Mattia Mossano and Melanie Volkamer was accepted at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (USEC’22). USEC’22 will probably take place April 23, 2022 in San Diego.

Peter Mayer has joined the program committee of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022) this year. The conference will be held August 7-9, 2022 in Boston, MA, USA. Papers have to registered for submission by February 11 and submitted by February 17.

The registration for the third Distinguished Lecture is now open. On February 11, Prof. Angela Sasse will talk about “Behavioural Science Meets Security: Why a Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing”. Prof. Sassel is the chair of Human-Centered Security at the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic the talk will be streamed online only.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the “Research Opportunities in Evidence-Based Elections” white paper, written by Josh Benaloh, Philip B. Stark, Vanessa Teague, Melanie Volkamer, and Dan Wallach. This white paper highlights the need for evidence-based elections, which can convince people that the results of elections are accurate, and suggests several technologies that could play a role in this, mostly focused on risk-limiting audits and end-to-end verifiability.

The Privacy Friendly Apps (PFA) which were developed by the SECUSO research group were nominated for the Digital Autonomy Award and were chosen for one of the ten best solutions. They will now be part of an open online voting. Until February 18, everyone can vote for the SECUSO PFAs! With the Digital Autonomy Award, digital solutions, products and services are honored, which help people to choose for a self-determined handling of their data.

On December 18, 2021, the opening of the exhibition “Digiloglounge N°1: Wem können wir vertrauen” (Digiloglounge N°1: Whom to trust) took place in the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The video of the opening ceremony is now available. The exhibition shows the online game “Phishing Master” and the NoPhish quiz. Both materials were developed with or by the SECUSO research group. “Phishing Master” was developed by two students as part of the project digilog@bw, which is funded by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst (MWK) in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The SECUSO research group was and will be represented by Anne Hennig as Publicity Chair at two conferences: At EuroUSEC 2021 (October 11 & 12) together with Dr. Peter Mayer, who was Programme Committee Chair and in the upcoming year at the conference “Sicherheit 2022”, which is organized by the group “Sicherheit - Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit (security - protection and reliability) within the German Informatics Society (GI). The conference “Sicherheit 2022” will take place from April 5 to 8, 2022, in Karlsruhe. 

Three papers that were written by or with members of the SECUSO research group reached more than 1000 Downloads this year. Among the top 10 are the paper “Phishing-Kampagnen zur Mitarbeiter-Awareness : Analyse aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln: Security, Recht und Faktor Mensch” by Melanie Volkamer, Angela M. Sasse and Franziska Boehm (2020), the paper “Mental Models: General Introduction and Review of Their Application in Human-Centred Security” (2013) by Melanie Volkamer and Karen Renaud, and “Aktuelle Entwicklungen im Kontext von Online-Wahlen und digitalen Abstimmungen” (2021), which immediately finished up third.

On June 7, 2021, Melanie Volkamer was invited as guest speaker for the Distinguished Lecture at CASA - Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries. CASA is part of the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at the Ruhr Universität Bochum. Prof. Volkamer talked about “Usable Verifiable Electronic Voting”. The video of the talk is now online on the CASA YouTube channel.

The city of Stuttgart will use the NoPhish quiz, which was developed by the SECUSO research group as part of the NoPhish Concept, to train their staff. We are happy that we could win in total ten new users and supporters over to our NoPhish materials in 2021. Among the newbies are the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the consumer advice center (Verbraucherhschutzzentrale) in North Rhine-Westphalia and the German Spy Museum in Berlin as the latest user.

The governing parties in Germany planned in their coalition agreement to allow online stockholders’ meetings permanently. The regulations were changed on an interim basis due to the pandemic to allow socially distanced voting. In a press release, Prof. Volkamer criticizes that current black-box voting systems do not allow verifiability and show in general several vulnerabilities. The press release was shared for example on Zeit Online, the Süddeutschen Zeitung, the Badischen Neuesten Nachrichten, the Merkur, the General-Anzeiger as well as in the RTL News and in several specialised media and online portals (datensicherheit.de, IT-daily, t-online, finanzen.net, u.v.m.).

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of institutions, government agencies, associations and companies have to organize elections and ballot voting without putting the health of voters and poll workers at risk. We are happy to see that our position paper on the actual trends in the context of online voting and digital polls exceeds the number of 1000 downloads since it was published in September. The paper was a joint work of the research group SECUSO, the KIT institutes KASTEL and ITAS, and other researchers.

Within the context of cyber espionage, the German Spy Museum in Berlin now also shows the NoPhish videos of the SECUSO research group. Furthermore, we could agree on further cooperation in interesting talks. In the future, the museum will also include the NoPhish Challenge Cards in terms of short games as part of it’s exhibition.

The SECUSO NoPhish research results were part of an online training on cybercrime at the United Nations African Union Mission in Dafur (UNAMID). In consultation with SECUSO, detective chief superintendent (KHK) Rühl, police department South-Hesse, used the english version of the NoPhish videos to train the staff in dealing with e-mails. Especially international organisations are regularly the target of organized cybercrime attacks. 

Corona has shown that especially at schools digital processes are lagging behind. In many cases, workarounds were put before security and data protection. We are therefore thrilled to see that the Kant-Gymnasium in Karlsruhe committed themselves to another course: As of now, passwords and user data will be stored securely and user-friendly. Dr. Peter Mayer was invited to speak about password security and the use of password managers at a school meeting last Friday. Together with the teachers, he developed strategies and exchanged ideas about password security and secure password usage.

Free apps are mainly financed through advertisements, tracker and user data. But not our Privacy Friendly Apps: No data are collected and not user profiles are compiled. Chip.de describes in a detailed review the functionalities of the Privacy Friendly Weather App. The bottom line is: The app is straightforward and clever and users are not bothered by location trackers. And the best: It’s free and truly privacy friendly!

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Karen Renaud will present her insights on the topic “Moving from ‘Human as problem’ to ‘Human as Solution’ in Cybersecurity”. Dr. Karen Renaud is a Senior Lecturer at Strathclyde University and was awarded KIT International Excellence Fellow 2021. The talk will be streamed online via Zoom on Thursday, November 25 at 6pm. No registration is needed. 

The “Nacht der Wissenschaft (night of science) will be held this semester in the night of November 26. Many exciting talks from different areas of research are waiting for the visitors. The event will be held online. Mattia Mossano will represent the SECUSO research group with a talk on “Security and Privacy for Everyone”. The talk will be held in English at 9 pm in room 2.

The German symposium “Sicherheit” (Security) is a periodic event of the division “Sicherheit - Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit” (Security - Protection and Reliability) of the German Informatics Society (GI). The upcoming conference will take place in Karlsruhe from April 5 to 8, 2022. The event is organised by Delphine Reinhardt, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and Christian Wressnegger, KASTEL Security Research Labs at KIT. Anne Hennig will represent the SECUSO research group as Publicity Chair.

In Germany, mainly “black-box voting systems” are used for online voting. But researchers demand for end-to-end verifiable online voting systems. Prof. Melanie Volkamer will talk about the risk of black-box voting systems in the “Mittwochsseminar” (Thursday Seminar) of the Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten on November 24, 2021. She will also explain the benefits and current challenges of end-to-end verifiable voting systems.

Challenges that are related to the digital transformation have to be negotiated with all stakeholders in the society. Within the project “Dialog für Cyber-Sicherheit” (Dialogue for cybersecurity), which is organised by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), representatives from society enter the dialogue with different stakeholders from academia, culture and media, economy as well as politics. Within five “workstreams”, different topics are discussed. The workstream on effective IT security awareness measures is supported by Melanie Volkamer (SECUSO) and Angela Sasse (Ruhr University Bochum). The five workstreams started their discussions in July 2021. The exchange of information will last until March 2022.

Chaos in Berlin during the federal election last Sunday: Invalid ballots, long lines in front of the polling locations and delayed election results. Would online voting be an alternative here? Prof. Melanie Volkamer explains in an interview with radioeins, why this is currently not the case. 

Prof. Melanie Volkamer will talk about human factors in IT security as part of the event “Nichts sehen. Nichts hören. Nichts sagen.” from the Karlsruher IT security initiative (KA-IT-Si) on October 21, 2021. In the talk, Prof. Volkamer will discuss which security awareness measurements should be implemented as part of the IT security in companies. She will further explain, why awareness is an important precondition for an effective IT security concept.

Save the date: Melanie Volkamer will talk to Dirk Arendt, Head of Government & Public at Trend Micro, about IT security in companies on October 7th. Security measures are most effective when everyone is on board - but how to raise awareness for the topic among the employees? Registration for the talk called “Espressorunde” on October 7, 2021 from 9 to 9.30 am is mandatory.

Don’t forget: KIT Science Week will take place for the first time from October 5 to 10, 2021. The SECUSO research group will organize a workshop called “Digital Self-Defense - NoPhish”. The workshop will be an in-person event and seats are limited. So register now via the website of the Science Week.

Melanie Volkamer and Jörn Müller-Quade spoke out on the topic of requirements for secure online voting in the context of an KIT expert letter this week. Their claims are based on the latest position paper that deals with current developments in the context of online voting and digital elections. Magazines like “IT-Zoom” and “Elektronik Praxis” took up on this issue.

In celebration of Hermann von Helmholtz’s 200th birthday, the Helmholtz Association is presenting 200 scientific challenges, researchers in the Helmholtz centres are currently working on. Challenge No. 65 is dedicated to the topic of secure E-Voting. With the German federal elections around the corner, more and more people in Germany are supportive of online voting. But urgent research questions are still without answers, such as: How can security of the ballot be ensured? How can the voter’s trust in online voting systems be increased?

According to current numbers, two third of the German citizens would consider e-voting at elections. Questions of security and trust are not always asked in these processes. At #meetdigilog, Prof. Volkamer will explain whom citizens and organizers need to trust when holding online elections. She will also explain why current, non-electronic voting will be the future rather than absentee voting via letter or the Internet. #meetdialog will be streamed via the Instagram channel of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) on September 23, 2021, 17.30 to 18.00.

According to the Bitkom survey for Germany, two thirds of their participants are in favour of online voting in German federal elections. In a recently published paper, the research group SECUSO, the KIT institutes KASTEL and ITAS, together with other researchers, explain why it is much more difficult to secure an online election than, for example, digital shopping. In addition, the paper offers a discussion of some online elections that have been carried out in Germany as well as some explanations of existing requirements catalogues.

The annual convention of the German Association of Law and Informatics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Recht und Informatik e.V., DGRI) will take place in Leipzig from November 25-27, 2021. Prof. Melanie Volkmer, head of the SECUSO research group, will talk about online voting and decision-making in the corporations law. The talk will be held in the context of digital challenges for the management. The convention will take place mainly as an in-person event. Registration is mandatory.

Our SECUSO explanatory video on online elections is now also available in English. In the video “Voting over the Internet - Maybe an option you think of … during the pandemic” we explain why easy to use online voting systems are not at all secure. And we suggest using end-to-end verifiable Internet Voting Systems as an alternative.

Melanie Volkamer had an extensive conversation with Adrian Hartschuh from the newspaper "Die Rheinpfalz".
The topic was e-voting and the demand of end-to-end verifiable electronic voting systems.
Find more information about the conversation and e-voting in the article (German only).

The spotlight text is published on the digilog-bw.de website. It is a contribution to the topic of cookies with regard to privacy and data protection. The text highlights the following aspects: the design of cookie disclaimers on popular websites, the current legal situation in this respect and the fields of action in connection with cookies. Users of the websites are invited to write to the data protection officers, the website operators and to contact us. The article was developed as part of the digilog@bw project, which is financed by MWK (Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst).

Note: The spotlight is written in German. 

The registration for EuroUSEC 2021 is now open! Attendance is free of charge for everyone this year. However, registration is mandatory. EuroUSEC will be held online on October 11 & 12, 2021. Since a record number of 62 submissions was received this year, attendees can hope for inspiring research talks from everything about Usable Security and Privacy. Dr. Peter Mayer, Program Co-Chair, and Anne Hennig, Publicity Co-Chair, will represent SECUSO as part of the event.

On Friday, 27th July 2021, the US Federal Trade Commission will host its sixth annual PrivacyCon. PrivacyCon 2021 will bring together representatives from academia, industry, consumer advocates, and government regulators to discuss current trends in consumer privacy and data security. As part of PrivacyCon 2021, SECUSO will present research results stemming from a study on individuals' awareness, perception, and reactions to data breaches that affected them. A paper on these results was also accepted for publication at the USENIX Security Symposium 2021.

Our paper "Evaluation der interaktiven NoPhish Präsenzschulung" from Benjamin Berens, Lukas Aldag, and Melanie Volkamer was accepted at the Mensch und Computer (MuC 2021) workshop.
The paper investigates the long-term effectiveness of our anti-phishing workshop "NoPhish" and extends previous research results. MuC will take place as a hybrid event between the 5. and 8. of September, both virtual and at the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt.

The second paper of the SECUSO research group that was accepted at the European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2021) is about an analysis of YouTube’s most popular videos about password security. In their vision paper “What Johnny learns about Password Security from Videos posted on YouTube”, Mathieu Christmann, Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer found that those videos cover only a fraction of what can be considered essential knowledge about password security. The vision paper will be presented at EuroUSEC 2021, which will be held online on October 11 and 12, 2021.

The paper "Usable Verifiable Secrecy-Preserving E-Voting" by Oksana Kulyk, ITU Center for Information Security and Trust, Reto König, Berner Fachhochschule BFH, Philipp Locher, Jonas Ludwig and Melanie Volkamer, SECUSO research group at Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), has been accepted at this year's E-Vote-ID conference. The paper describes the design and the evaluation of user friendly interfaces for vote casting and vote verification in a code-based voting system. The conference will be held online from October 5-8, 2021.

The paper “How to Improve Awareness for Password Security by Shifting to a State-of-the-art Password Policy” by Mathieu Christmann, Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer was accepted at the “7th Who are you?! Adventures in Authentication Workshop” (WAY 2021). The workshop will take place as a virtual event on August 8th, 2021.

The internet offers a plethora of ways to make money from the pandemic. While it was protective masks at the beginning, later corona tests that were offered via fake websites. Peter Mayer about fake shops, frauds and forgeries in an interview with Stefan Fuchs from the KIT campusradio.

In the first known study to ask participants about actual data breaches that impacted them, researchers from SECUSO, the University of Michigan and the George Washington University showed 413 people facts from up to three data breaches that involved their own personal information. The study found that people were not aware of 74% of the breaches shown to them. The researchers also found that most of those affected by breaches blamed their own personal behaviours for being affected. The paper describing this study will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium. The pre-print is already available.

Prof. Melanie Volkamer and Benjamin Bachmann, director for cyber security at EXXETA, developed seven recommendations for information security officers in companies. The guidelines, which are based on scientific research and practical knowledge, were specified with the help of several skilled third parties. Version 1.1 is now available under a new link.

Complexity isn’t always the way to go: Prof. Melanie Volkamer and Dr. Peter Mayer talk in an “SWR Landesschau” report about password security and the advantages of password managers. With respect to password security, lengths beats complexity, explains Prof. Volkamer. Longer passwords provide more possible combinations, which make them unappealing for attackers.

The second edition of the German textbook “Sicherheitskritische Mensch-Computer-Interaktion” is published. Melanie Volkamer, Peter Mayer, Benjamin Reinheimer and several former members of the SECUSO research group contributed with a chapter about human factors in security. The chapter provides a general introduction in the topic focussing on end users. The chapter elaborates on the problems about human factors in security and explains common problems by the examples of E-Mail encryption, https and passwords.

Dr. Peter Mayer and Dr. Marco Ghiglieri deliver this semester's lecture on information security. Again, there will be a guest speaker as part of the lecture. It is a pleasure to welcome Dr. Stefan Brink, commissioner for data privacy and information security in Baden-Wuerttemberg. He will talk about data protection and privacy on July 5, 2021.

We’d like to introduce STAR, our new team member! STAR is a humanoid robot, who will assist the SECUSO research group in the field of security awareness. He will assist at several events, for example at the “Night of Digitalisation” in Karlsruhe. His first job will be to present E-Mails to the visitors of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM). The visitors should then tell whether the E-Mail is fraudulent or not. STAR is the abbreviation for Security Teaching and Awareness Robot.

Are you suffering from physical inactivity? Try the “Aktivpause to Go”! The Institute of Sports and Sports Sciences at KIT recommends the SECUSO app “Aktivpause to Go”. Within the context of workplace health management, the app helps students and staff to balance the lack of exercise during office work. Physical activity reduces health problems resulting from desk work. Give it a try!

We fundamentally improved and extended our privacy friendly weather app in the last months. Users can now access the actual weather, hourly forecasts for the next two days or forecasts with visualized trends for their selected locations. Furthermore, users can access rain maps, compare their actual weather with other locations in a selected radius or check the weather of four other locations on their home-screen widget. The weather app is available on Google Play and F-Droid.ar.

Business procedures become more and more digitalized and cybersecurity is therefore a prevalent topic in most of the companies. Melanie Volkamer will talk about the human factor in IT security concepts during this year’s IHK IT security conference. The conference is organised by the IHK Reutlingen and will take place as a virtual event on June 29th, 2021. All talks will be held in German.

Melanie Volkamer has joined this year's program committee of the workshop "Future of PI: Challenges and Perspectives of Personal Identification”. The workshop will take place on September 6, 2021 as a virtual event. It is co-located with EuroS&P 2021. Submissions for talk proposals are possible until May 21st.

“There is no glory in prevention” - but security warnings about compromises in IT systems are inevitable. Felix Schledde, reporter at WDR talked with Melanie Volkamer about how to warn people without spreading panic. Prof. Volkamer said that it is essential to help people understanding security warnings and aligning those warnings with their previous knowledge. 

Last week Melanie Volkamer, head of the SECUSO research group, and other IT security researchers talked about “Usable Security in SME”. The video of the webinar is now online and can be watched on YouTube. 

Thorsten Frenzel and Dirk Arendt spoke with Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer about electronic voting in the latest episode of the podcast “eGovernment”. Amongst other topics, they talked about different voting systems, how to secure the voting and make the vote count open to scrutiny. Are you considering to conduct an electronic election? Or are you eligible to vote in an electronic election? Then you should listen to this episode of eGovernment!

Melanie Volkamer, head of the SECUSO research group, and other IT security researcher will be talking about “Usable Security in SME” on Tuesday, 27.04.2021. The focus of the discussion is on useful security measures for small and medium-sized enterprises and the question how and when it is advisable to take your employees on board. Attendance is free, but registration for the webinar is recommended.

The German Informatics Society (GI) spotlighted the SECUSO research on graphical authentication methods in their last newsletter. Several studies showed that people and especially kids can remember pictures better than complex passwords based on alphanumerical strings. Which makes authentication methods using pictures more secure than ht euse of weak passwords. In a study with 44 students on a German elementary school, we wanted to examine, weather the kids could remember pictures. The result was overwhelming: If the pictures are chosen which are close to the kid’s world of experience, those authentication methods are an excellent option.

The blog post is published on the digilog-bw.de website. First, it provides general information about phishing. If additional knowledge is desired, further links are provided to the SECUSO Website. Two students Tobias Länge and Philipp Matheis developed the entertaining (online phishing) game. It helps users to learn to distinguish between fraudulent and real(legitim) messages. The idea to learn about phishing with a game can catch the interest of new target groups as well. The game was developed as part of the digilog@bw project, which is financed by MWK (Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst).
Note: The blog post is written in German. 

Several members of KASTEL, Dr. iur. Anne Steinbrück, Dr. rer. pol. Marcus Wiens, Dr. ing. Pascal Birnstill, Florian Kaiser, Dr. Tim Zander, Prof. (apl.) Dr. Oliver Raabe, Prof. Dr. Frank Schultmann and Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer, published a joint article in the German legal journal „Recht auf Datenverarbeitung (RDV 2021, S. 7)“ (Right of information processing). The article analyses the legal arguments of an 2019’s order of the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf  (OLG Düsseldorf v. 26.08.2019, Az.: VI Kart 1/19 (V)) from an economical point of view. The order deals with the application of antitrust legislation in the context of violation of privacy rights.

Phishing and staff awareness campaigns is one of the main topics in the latest issue of the German journal “Computer und Arbeit”. Prof. Volkamer, head of the SECUSO research group, explains why phishing trainings are not always recommended and which are more effective ways to train your staff. Increasing awareness is essential since the strategies of the cybercriminals become more and more sophisticated. AI systems, for example, are trained to automatically extract information on the targeted persons. This aids cybercriminals, says Prof. Müller-Quade, head of the Institute for Cryptography and Security at KIT.

ACSAC brings together cutting-edge researchers, with a broad cross-section of security professionals drawn from academia, industry, and government, gathered to present and discuss the latest security results and topics. With peer reviewed technical papers, invited talks, panels, national interest discussions, workshops, and professional development and training courses, ACSAC continues its core mission of investigating practical solutions for computer and network security technology. This year's conference will be held from 6-10 December 2021.

Last Wednesday, 24.03.2021, all partners met for a second project meeting in the INSPECTION project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The partners from MindUp Web & Intelligence GmbH, BDO AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft and the SECUSO research group presented new research results. Associated partners as well as other interested parties talked about their current projects (amongst others Allianz für Sicherheit in der Wirtschaft (ASW), Baden-Württembergischer Handwerkstag (BWTH), Deutschland sicher im Netz e.V., eco - Verband der Internetwirtschaft, dem Fachverband Elektro- und Informationstechnik Baden Württemberg (FV EIT BW), der Swiss Internet Security Alliance, Watchlist Internet and Verbraucherzentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen). In the research project INSPECTION we are identifying a special type of hacking through Fake Shop owners. Dr. Peter Mayer and Anne Hennig, M.A., from the SECUSO research group are focussing on ways to contact the victims and provide awareness materials. 

Sending out E-Mails with malicious links is a common practice of scammers. In order to effectively detect phishing emails, it is necessary to carefully check the web address (also called URL) behind the link. TORPEDO (TOoltip-poweRed Phishing Email DetectiOn) helps to expose malicious links in phishing e-mails so that you can expose their attempts to deceive you.
We now updated TORPEDO and added further information in the tutorial and the tooltip-notes. With this: Add on!
Do you want to help us, improve the functions of TORPEDO? We’d love to hear from you via Twitter or E-Mail. We are currently looking for participants in a TORPEDO-related field study. 

The statement on Corona rapid tests and Fake Shops was published in various media. The press release of the „Deutschen Presseagentur (dpa)“ was taken up in local and national newspapers (e.g. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau) as well as online media (e.g. Zeit Online, Deutsche Handwerks Zeitung). Broadcasts like N-TV or magazine programs like Galileo published the information as well. HR4 and Stern online as well as the Pro7 show „taff“ and „RTLextra" took the chance to interview Peter Mayer on this topic.

With “Digital Dialogue”, the district Marburg-Biedenkopf offers its citizens a series of events to talk about the digital transformation. Within this series, Prof. Volkamer talked on March 9th 2021 about cybersecurity. How can you tell legitimate and fraudulent messages apart? Is it secure to buy in a certain shop? Prof. Volkamer gave insight in the topic, explained risks and threats, and offered tips on how to protect against scammers. More than 50 persons took part in the talk and the discussion.

Simulated Phishing Trainings are a popular way of training your staff to detect fraudulent messages and potential phishing attacks. But most companies are not aware that effective security is not just about reducing clickrates for simulated phishing messages. Furthermore, there are security, legal, and trust issues associated with those trainings. Prof. Melanie Volkamer, head of the SECUSO research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Prof. Martina Angela Sasse, professor for Human-Centered Security at Ruhr University Bochum, and Prof. Franziska Böhm, professor at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, recommend a different approach. Instead of costly and time-consuming Simulated Phishing Trainings the authors conclude that for many organisations, improving technical security measures, introducing and establishing adequate security incident reporting, and increasing staff awareness through other means may be more effective.

The SECUSO research group presented several activities on occasion of this year’s Safer Internet Day: A NoPhish Quiz, a shooting game to eliminate fraudulent messages and an FAQ about Fake Shops. Both topics - Phishing and Fake Shops - were taken up by the media as well. Prof. Melanie Volkamer was interviewed by SWR 4 radio station and “Radio Lotte” about Internet Safety. Radio station SWR 3 picked up on a cyberattack in a water treatment facility in Florida to talk with Prof. Volkamer about the security of critical infrastructures in Germany. BadenTV tested the Phishing Master Online Game and had Prof. Volkamer and Dr. Peter Mayer explain the idea. But it’s not over yet: Our activities will be still available!

Two students Tobias Länge and Philipp Matheis developed an entertaining game called “Phishing Master” as part of the KASTEL internship. In this game, users learn to distinguish between fraudulent and real(legitim) messages. The work was supervised as part of the digilog@bw project, which is financed by MWK. It can be played online from now on and it is one of our contributions to the Safer Internet Day on 09.02.2021.

There is an urgent E-Mail from your boss in your inbox: You should immediately transfer a pretty large sum. The URL included in the E-Mail will provide more information. But is this really a legitimate message?
Scammers use various strategies to harm your and/or your business. Sending messages with harmful content is a popular technique that can be harmful in different ways. In the message you can be advised to transfer money, to contact a pay-per-call number or to open harmful URLs and/or attachments. Is the message sent via E-Mail, it is called a Phishing E-Mail.
On the occasion of the Safer Internet Day 2021 we published further NoPhish materials. You can take an easy test to assess whether you can detect fraudulent messages correctly. Check it out!

The NoPhish concept aims to enable as many citizens as possible to recognize fraudulent messages (including phishing messages) with dangerous links and attachments. For this purpose, we currently provide a training course (for citizens), two videos, several challenge posters, a poster with rules, and an info card. During the BSI in Dialog 2020 event, Arne Schönbohm, President of the BSI, said that he is grateful to the SECUSO research group at KIT for our very good awareness materials protect themselves against fraudsters on the Internet. Many of the materials are available in both German and English.

Is your privacy important to you? Then take today as an opportunity and swap one or the other app on your smartphone for one of our privacy-friendly apps and that without having to fear violating your own right to informational self-determination. Therefore, Dr. Stefan Brink, State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Baden-Württemberg), is supporting SECUSO's initative to develop privacy friendly apps.

Our NoPhish concept is also recommended in the new CyberFibel of the BSI.
The CyberFibel is for people who work professionally or voluntarily in consumer advice/education. These people can use the CyberFibel in associations, foundations, educational institutions or federations to help others achieve a secure approach to the digital world. The NoPhish concept is intended to help everyone recognize phishing messages and fraudulent messages faster and better.

https://www.cyberfibel.de/webcode/extra-risiken-verstehen-02/
 

The first CAST workshop for the year 2021 will take place on January 14th. The workshop that was canceled due to the pandemic in April 2020 was rescheduled and will be held online on January 14th. In addition to SECUSO/KASTEL@KIT, speakers from the following organizations are invited: Fraunhofer IESE, DHBW Stuttgart, Ruhr University Bochum. Our cooperation partner Dr. Ghiglieri from SICHER3 will also give a presentation. SECUSO's talk is entitled "Effective measures to increase IT security awareness". CAST is the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology in Darmstadt.

We have put together the highlights of 2020. We would like to thank all collaborators for 2020 and we look forward to exciting research and teaching in 2021.

Dr. Niklas Kühl (IISM / KSRI) in an interview with Radio Regenbogen about our joint HICSS paper:'“Healthy surveillance”: Designing a concept for privacy-preserving mask recognition AI in the age of pandemics'

The Special Session on Humans And Cyber Security Security 2020 (HACS 2020) will be held virtually on December 2nd 2020 as part of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing. The special session provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners interested in humans and cyber security to share latest research and developments. SECUSO team member Peter Mayer participates in HACS 2020 as panelist in the Round Table Discussion on the topic "State-of-the-art research from academic front on 'hacking the human'".

The KASTEL certificate is awarded to students at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for their skill in the area of IT security. It can be obtained on both, the MAster's level and when acquiring a PhD. This year, the KASTEL certificate was awarded among others to Katerina Dimitrova during the course of her Master's studies and to Peter Mayer in the course of this PhD.

As part of the EXU project “KIT Future Fields”, Prof. Weinhardt (IISM), Prof. Mädche (IISM), Prof. Nieken (IBU), Prof. Scheibehenne (IISM), Prof. Szech (ECON), Prof. Volkamer (AIFB) and Prof. Woll (IfSS) get funded for 18 months for the project "Digital Citizen Science @ KD²Ex": Experimental research on well-being, work and education at home ".

The trade-off between personal data protection and AI performance is an exciting field of research. In the ongoing fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, many governments have recommended—or even obliged—their citizens to wear masks as an effective countermeasure. In an interdisciplinary, cross-institute (IISM, KSRI and AIFB / KASTEL / SECUSO) work, Niklas Kühl, Dominik Martin, Clemens Wolff, and Melanie Volkamer show what a privacy-friendly mask recognition video system could look like. This paper is an update of the paper with the same title published in summer.

Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer, Dr. Peter Mayer and Reyhan Düzgün from the research group SECUSO as well as Dr. Sanchari Das from the University of Denver won a Research Award from Facebook for their research on secure and usable authentication methods in Augmented and Virtual Reality technology. AR & VR devices increasingly offer social activities that require secure and usable authentication. SECUSO proposes the ZeTA (Zero-Trust-Authentication) protocol, which enables secure authentication in shared rooms and can be used with the available interaction methods of Head-Mounted Displays. 

Christopher Beckmann is a member of the SECUSO research group since October 01, 2020. He studied IT-Security at the Technical University (TU) of Darmstadt and will be working on the Privacy Friendly Apps and teaching as a research associate.

In times of pandemics, many are looking for secure alternatives for secret face-to-face polls/ elections. In 2:20 minutes we explain on YouTube what has to be taken into account for remote electronic elections. Many thanks for constructive feedback go to: Prof. Bernhard Beckert and Michael Kirsten from KIT, Prof. Rüdiger Grimm from Fraunhofer SIT, Prof. Robert Krimmer from the University of Tartu, Prof. Oksana Kulyk from the IT University in Copenhagen and Prof. Reto King from the Bern University of Applied Sciences.

The Zeek Week 2020 will take place online this year from 13 to 15 October. SECUSO and the research group Decentralised Systems and Network Services (DSN) of Prof. Hartenstein present their tool Emojifier and lead a discussion about future research in this area. The Emojifier tool will help the users of Zeek Logs to separate and assign the different messages faster. Our presentation will take place on 14.10 at 21:20.

The blog post on " Stress test for administrative staff - Are you considering to achieve security awareness through simulated phishing campaigns? Then better read here first." (in German) by Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer, Prof. Dr. Franziska Boehm (KIT, FIZ Karlsruhe) and Prof. Dr. Angela Sasse (University Bochum, Horst-Görtz Institute) was published on the 'Verwaltung der Zukunft' (future of public administration) platform.

This year's E-Vote-ID conference will be held digital from Oct 7 to Oct 9. The conference is organized by Robert Krimmer and Melanie Volkamer. Bernhard Beckert from KASTEL is one of the track chairs being in charge in deciding which papers to be accepted and published with Springer.  Special Thanks go to David Duenas-Cid for making the digital conference happen. Registration is open still open.

On the 22. and 23.10 this year the Cybersecurity Conference will take place in Mannheim. The aim is to better connect the economy, science and the public. Cyber security has not yet reached the necessary level to make Germany secure, therefore the transfer of knowledge between these partners is especially important. In the context of the conference SECUSO will give a talk on Phishing Awareness and report about our findings regarding the development and implementation of material. 

The blog post on "How to make your employees aware of IT security - seven recommendations for information security officers" (in German) by Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer and Benjamin Bachmann (Director Cyber Security at EXXETA AG) was published on the 'Verwaltung der Zukunft' (future of public administration) platform.

The free Android Apps from SECUSO only ask for necessary permissions and do not display any advertisement. The apps have already been installed more than 70,000 times. Very popular are for example the apps Sudoku, Shopping List and Password Generator. The apps for PIN Memorization Strategies and NoPhish Training also received very good ratings. In addition to the Google Play Store, our apps can also be downloaded on F-Droid.

Prof. Christof Weinhardt (IISM), Prof. Alexander Mädche (IISM), Prof. Petra Nieken (IBU), Prof. Benjamin Scheibehenne (IISM), Prof. Nora Szech (ECON), Melanie Volkamer (AIFB) and Prof. Alexander Woll (IFSS), have jointly received funding for the establishment of the Karlsruhe Decision & Design Experimentation Ecosystem (KD²Ex). Funding is granted within the framework of a KIT Future Fields. The project enables new forms of participatory research: Digital Citizen Science with a focus on the area of "Wellbeing at Home".

The number of reference users of our NoPhish materials continues to grow. We now know of 31 organisationsthat use our materials. We are particularly pleased that other universities and applied universities have recently joined the list (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Hochschule Koblenz, Universität Würzburg, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Hochschule Konstanz, Fernuniversität Hagen, Hochschule Worms, Universität Bamberg, Universität Mannheim).
 

The paper “Towards Secure and Usable Authentication for Augmented and Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays” by Reyhan Düzgün, Peter Mayer, Sanchari Das and Melanie Volkamer was accepted at the Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication (WAY) 2020 workshop. The paper presents the use of the ZeTA authentication protocol by Andreas Gutmann et al. with AR and VR glasses. The workshop will be held online on 7th August 2020, alongside the SOUPS conference.

Our updated flyer “Active Pause and Active Pause to Go” provides now information on the app “Active Pause to Go” as well. The app was created in cooperation with the Institute of Sports and Sports Science of the KIT and helps integrating exercise breaks into your daily work. Further information and the link to the Google Play Store can be found in the flyer.

The paper “Analysis of publicly available anti-phishing webpages: contradicting information, lack of concrete advice, and very narrow attack vector” by Mattia Mossano, Kami Vaniea, Lukas Aldas, Reyhan Düzgün, Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer, developed in collaboration with the TULiPS  Research Group from the University of Edinburgh, has been accepted at EuroUSEC 2020.

https://eusec20.cs.uchicago.edu/#submission

The research project INSPECTION has stated on the 1st June 2020. Its goal is to identify hacked websites through web crawling and notify the owners of the affected websites in an effective manner. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the initiative "KMU-innovativ". For this project, SECUSO partnered with the companies mindUp GmbH and BDO Cybersecurity.
https://web-inspection.de/

In the "Baden TV Aktuell" broadcast on May 26th, 2020 Prof. Melanie Volkamer spoke about SECUSO research and especially about the Human Centered Design approach (9:30): https://baden-tv.com/baden-tv-aktuell-dienstag-2/

Together with Prof. Franziska Boehm (KIT / ZAR and FIZ Karlsruhe) and Prof. Martina Angela Sasse (RUB / CASA / HGI), an interdisciplinary analysis of phishing campaigns in companies and organisations was carried out. The results of the analysis are particularly important for anyone who is considering phishing campaigns against employees and / or colleagues. You can find the results at: 
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000119662

Philip Heller and Jannik Dresselhaus have joined SECUSO on 15th April 2020 to help out with programming tasks. Philip will help in developing anti-phishing tools in the course of the Google Faculty award SECUSO received in March 2020. Jannik will help in developing tools for studies in the area of user authentication.

The number of users of our NoPhish material is increasing.
Currently 20 Organizations/companies use our materials e.g. Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, HEAG, Polizeipräsidium Einsatz in Baden-Württemberg, Stadt Hamm oder Landesamt für
Geoinformation und Landesvermessung Niedersachsen (LGLN). We are pleased that our material is so well received. And we hope to continue to help other organisations, but also
individuals, to recognise fraudulent messages in the future.
https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/betruegerische_nachrichten_erkennen.php

Benjamin Reinheimer is on the program committee of the 6th Usable Security and Privacy Workshop, MuC 2020, which will take place in the context of the Mensch und Computer from September 6-9 in Magdeburg. https://muc2020.mensch-und-computer.de/eng/​​​​​​​

The new part-time M.Sc. The "Information Systems Engineering and Management (ISEM)" course has started successfully at the HECTOR School of Engineering and Management. The course main focus is the digital transformation of products, services and organizations. Accordingly, there is now also a compulsory module on security and privacy engineering with lectures on information security (Prof. Melanie Volkamer), applied cryptography (Prof. Jörn Müller-Quade), network security (Prof. Thorsten Strufe), data protection regulations (Prof Franziska Böhm) and Emerging Technologies and Critical Information Infrastructures (Prof. Ali Sunyeav). Further information on the course and application can be found on the HECTOR School website.

http://www.hectorschool.kit.edu/ISEM.php

The new semester is starting soon! To make it easier for you to choose which courses you want to visit, we have prepared an overview of our courses in the summer and winter term. In addition, Industrial Engineering students get some recommendations on how to credit our courses in their studies. PDF

Industrial Engineering and Business Informatics students can receive the KASTEL certificate as well. Therefore, we compiled some information about the qualification for the certificate. You can find a list of creditable courses and recommendations for module combinations here. Here for PDF

"Everything on the net is hackable. How do we prevent the worst?" is the title of the article and podcast by Lisa Hegemann and Meike Laff. The topic is that people are often mistakenly described as the greatest vulnerability when a computer system has been hacked. Prof. Volkamer puts an end to this false assumption.
https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2020-03/it-sicherheit-datenschutz-digitalisierung-internet-digitalpodcast

Prof. Melanie Volkamer and Florian Schaub received one of this year's seven Google Faculty Research Awards in the field of security. The award was granted for the project "Link-centric Phishing Warnings for Online Email Clients".  We look forward working with Florian Schaub and the University of Michigan. Also many thanks to our Google advocates Patrick Gage and Alexander de Luca.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/announcing-2019-google-faculty-research.html

Reyhan Düzgün is the newest member of SECUSO since February 1, 2020. She studied Industrial Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and will be working on methodology research in the area of usable security.

The paper "Towards Improving the Efficacy of Code-Based Verification in Internet Voting" by Oksana Kulyk, Melanie Volkamer, Monika Müller and Karen Renaud was accepted at the Financial Crypto Workshop 'Voting 2020'. The workshop will take place on February 14, 2020 in Sabah (Malaysia) for the fifth time.

https://fc20.ifca.ai/voting/program.html

The call for papers for the 5th European Workshop on Usable Security has been published. The PC chairs of this year's workshop are Peter Mayer and Blase Ur. Deadline for submissions is 16th March 2020 (Anywhere on Earth).
https://eusec20.cs.uchicago.edu/

Mattia Mossano is the newest member of SECUSO since December 1, 2019. He’ll be working on phishing and anti-phishing user training. He studied philosophy at the University of Genoa and Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh. https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/Staff_1091.php

The paper "Security and Privacy Awareness in SmartEnvironments – A Cross-Country Investigation" by Oksana Kulyk, Benjamin Maximilian Reinheimer, Lukas Aldag, Nina Gerber, Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for presentation at AsiaUSEC 2020. The workshop will be held February 13-15, 2020 in Sabah (Malaysia) conjunctions with Financial Cryptography.

https://easychair.org/cfp/AsiaUSEC20

GUDialog is organized by the Institute for Society and Digital at Münster University of Applied Sciences. Peter Mayer is invited to give a talk on January 15, 2020 on the topic "Secure use of passwords". The offer is aimed at both the specialist audience and interested citizens.

https://www.fh-muenster.de/gud/gud/gudialog_Kalendar.php?termin=5294

The fifth European Workshop on Usable Security will be held on 15th June 2020 as pre-conference workshop of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy in Genova (Italy). The CfP and further information will be made available in the coming weeks.

In the afternoon of October 23rd, 2020 the 36th AIK symposium will take place in Karlsruhe: First the AIK association and the participating institutions Institute AIFB and KASTEL will be introduced. This is followed by four talks: Prof. Buchmann (expert for post-quantum cryptography from TU Darmstadt), Dr. Meletiadou (Head of Privacy Management at Vodafone), Dr. Achenbach (Head of the IT Security Competence Center and the Cyber Defense Team at the FZI), and Dr. Mayer (Usable & secure user authentication expert will introduce research results from SECUSO).

We are happy to announce that an other awareness NoPhish video is available. The five-minute video explains what dangerous attachments are and how to detect them. The video is a result of scientific evaluation of the effectiveness in regard to recognition of fraudulent messages with dangerous attachments. The video was developed in collaboration with Alex Lehmann.

https://s.kit.edu/it-sicherheit.betrueg-nachrichten.videos

We have updated our Flyer „Fraudulent messages - how to detect fraudulent and phishing mails“. Not only detecting these messages is important, but also an adequate reaction to them. For this we now refer to the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik): if you are unsure whether a message is a fraudulent message or if you have fallen for a fraudulent message, you can ask the BSI for advice.  Soon the leaflet will also be available in English.

https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/betr-nachrichten-flyer

Melanie Volkamer will participate in the panel discussion as part of the project "Institutionalization of Social Dialogue" at the BSI on November 28. It discusses the future of dialogue with our society and how cyber security can be better shaped for society.
https://www.bsi.bund.de/DE/Themen/DigitaleGesellschaft/Digitale_Gesellschaft/IdgD/IdgD_node.html

The Internet and other digital technologies pose risks that most users are hardly able to recognize and assess. Be it specific technical problems or possible application errors that could endanger yourself or your employer. The interview is about how to make people better aware of the risk on the internet and how to protect yourself.
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/radio/netzagent/Sicherheit-will-gelernt-sein,av-o1169873-100.html

Heike Obry is the newest member of the SECUSO research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Heike Obry studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe (today's KIT) from 1982 - 1987.
In addition to her main activity in the IT area of an automotive company, she now supports the SECUSO research group as a research assistant in the DIGILOG project.

In November we got the chance to give two workshops for the police in Darmstadt, Hessen. We are pleased to share our knowledge of phishing with all the interested people.

Active break of the workplace health management of the Institute of Sports and Sports Science meets SECUO's Privacy Friendly Apps. The new app "Active break to go!" reminds you of your favourite exercises at any time ... Whether on a business trip or at work. And all without your data being collected - simply privacy friendly. Give it a try:
https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/1054.php 
https://www.sport.kit.edu/Wissenstransfer_BetrieblichesGesundheitsmanagement.php

The number of cyber attacks is steadily increasing. Anyone who thinks they are safe from such attacks is mistaken: at work or at home - each of us can become the victims of Internet criminals. In the context of the European Cyber Security Month (ECSM) we inform in two events on how to protect yourself: On October 11 in the context of the 'Bunte Nacht der Digitalisierun' from 15: 00-21:00 on the Campus South of the KIT (building 20.30). On October 23 at Campus North in the Casino from 11: 00-14: 00.
https://cybersecuritymonth.eu/

We were delighted to host the third EU GHOST project meeting at KIT in Karlsruhe. GHOST aims to deploy a highly usable and effective security framework for smart home residents. The project will apply behavioural design principles for the elaboration of a novel reference architecture for user-centric cyber security in smart home environments. The GHOST consortium discussed the latest stage of the progress and the next steps during two consecutive days of meeting.
https://www.ghost-iot.eu

To kick off the digilog@bw research project funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg, all citizens are invited to submit their questions during this event and thus help to shape the project. In addition to SECUSO, other experts from KIT but also from the University of Mannheim and the University of Tübingen will be represented. A panel discussion will give an insight into the project. Subsequently, questions and suggestions can be addressed to the experts in smaller rounds.
https://digilog-bw.de/events/dialogbw-buergerinnenforum-im-rahmen-des-forschungsprojekts-digilogbw

During the international Safer Internet Day in February 2019 SECUSO participated in a KIT wide action to raise awareness for fradulent messages. The SCC news published an article to emphasize the success of this day. A lot of positive feedback is the reason for KIT to plan (and SECUSO to support) a second information event in the Cyber Security Month in autumn 2019.
https://www.scc.kit.edu/downloads/oko/SCCnews_01_2019_web.pdf

KASTEL-Professor Melanie Volkamer was interviewed for the article „What is Usable Security“ that was published on the 7th of august 2019 on the online platform of the „Computerwoche“. The article is about the human being as the weakest link of the security chain, because he makes mistakes. The question is, what does a user have to know to be secure online and does he have to be involved in the security process. Especially in the last point, Prof. Volkamer advises to pronounce certain design recommendations for developers, which should help the user to recognise the security easier.
https://www.computerwoche.de/a/amp/was-ist-usable-security,3547465

The next Security and Privacy Lunch at Café Gold is coming up. We would be delighted if we could once again welcome numerous researchers from a wide variety of organizations from Karlsruhe. The next lunch will take place on 20.08. at 13 o'clock. Also for "spontaneous" visits we ask for feedback to Rebekka Golling  so that we can reserve a sufficiently large table.

Within the framework of the KASTEL project, the research group cooperates with Stadtwerke Ettlingen. The cooperation aims to analyze the process of IT security mediation of the municipal utilities. Based on the experiences of the research group and the current state analysis, proposals will be developed to help disseminate the current IT security information and measures with defined processes within the company. This improvement will then be evaluated in a study.
https://www.sw-ettlingen.de/
https://www.kastel.kit.edu/

Also the second "Monthly Security and Privacy Lunch" in the restaurant Gold was well attended. Once again, 20 researchers from various organisations and research groups were on site to discuss current topics. We are happy that the response has been so great and that new people are constantly joining us. The next lunch will take place on 20.08. We ask for feedback to Rebekka Golling until 13.08, so that we can reserve a sufficiently large table. 

So the move is almost complete and SECUSO has now moved into its new offices. From now on you can find our new offices in building 5.20-3A. There are some boxes and little things left. But soon we got completely used to the new premises and are looking forward to designing the hallway according to our ideas.

The first "Monthly Security and Privacy Lunch" at Restaurant Gold was a success with 20 researchers from KIT, FZI, Frauenhofer IOSB and Frauenhofer ISI. We hope all participants had as much fun as we did. We would be happy if we could welcome as many people to the next meeting on 16.07.2019. Please contact Rebekka Golling (rebekka.golling@kit.edu) so that we can plan accordingly.

The poster "On The Systematic Development and Evaluation Of Password Security Awareness-Raising Materials" by Peter Mayer, Christian Schwartz, and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for presentation at SOUPS 2018. The conference will be held August 11–13, 2019 in Santa Clara (USA).

SECUSO Research used facebook for about five years as a platform to present current news and research results on topics such as data protection and the sensitive issue of the security of information. For some time, there has been negative press about facebooks negligent handling of data. Encrypted data and passwords are very important, so/ that’s why „SECUSO“ wants to set a statement by ending facebook presence.

SECUSO researcher Nina Gerber is co-organizing the 1st Interdisciplinary Workshop on Privacy and Trust (iPAT 2018).

The workshop is held in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2018) in Hamburg, Germany, on August 27th. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different fields in order to support users in protecting their private data. An interdisciplinary approach is needed to develop privacy enhancing technologies that address not only technical aspect, but also aspects related to usability, psychology, economy, sociology, philosophy, and law. This interdisciplinary workshop thus seeks submissions from a wide range of disciplines (computer science, usability, law, economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, ethics, …) that cover the various aspects of privacy and trust.

Submissions are due to May 4th.

The paper “Comparing "Challenge-Based" and "Code-Based" Internet Voting Verification Implementations” by Oksana Kulyk, Jan Henzel, Karen Renaud and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted at the INTERACT 2019 conference which will take place on September 2.-6 in  Pathos, Cyprus.

As program-committee-member, Melanie Volkamer will support a number of conferences and workshops: "Information Security and Privacy" Track at WI 2020, SPOSE (Security, Privacy, Organizations, and Systems Engineering) and STAST (Socio-Technical Aspects in SecuriTy)) ESORICS workshops as well as Sicherheit 2020.

https://spose-ws.github.io/
http://www.stast.uni.lu/
http://www.sicherheit2020.de/

Alireza Zarei has graduated from University of Göttingen with a Master degree in Applied Computer Science. Since April 2019, he is part of the GHOST project to develop a user-friendly application to improve security and privacy in Smart Homes.

The paper “Why Johnny Fails to Protect his Privacy” by Nina Gerber, Verena Zimmermann and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted at EuroUSEC 2019.

The Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) has appointed Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer to the steering committee of the "IT-Sicherheit in der Wirtschaft" initiative. The committee met in Berlin on March 12, 2019 for its constituent meeting. The steering committee consists of IT security experts from business, science and administration. It consults the initiative, provides impetus and supports it in raising awareness and implementing IT security measures.

The article "Sichere Instant Messaging Apps" by Jacqueline Brendel and Nina Gerber was accepted for publication in the journal "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit".

Melanie Volkamer will report on current research at the GFFT Technology Race "Measurement and Increase of Security Awareness" at Lekkerland in Cologne on April 26th, 2019. The talk will present foundations of sensitisation research and current results from the SECUSO research group.

A SECUSO member Oksana Kulyk will start as an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen on the 1st of March. She will continue to collaborate with SECUSO within the GHOST project.

Despite „Change Your Password Day“, do not change your password for no reason! The security advantage of changing your passwords as a precation is rather small. A better opportunity to use the day would be to set up a password manager or to try out two-factor authentication for particularly sensitive user accounts. More detailed information on the topic of regular password change can be found here, and general information about the protection of user accounts can be found here (both links currently German language only). 

The paper "Investigating People’s Privacy Risk Perception" by Nina Gerber, Benjamin Reinheimer and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for publication at the conference Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). The conference will be held July 16-20th, 2019 in Stockholm (Sweden).

Under the motto "Protect the IT-infrastructure of the KIT together" we developed new informaiton materials and awareness measures on the topic of cybersecurity together with other central facilities and research groups (SCC, KASTEL, AIFB, ZML). On the occasion of the Safer Internet Day, we present them to the public in the KIT cafeteria and make ourselves available for questions on the topic of cyber-security. 

At todays Data Privacy Day we would like to inform about the different risks considering privacy. To do that we developed some flyer, tools or explanation videos. Visit the following site to get an overview of our recent results.

Henrik Mucha is a new member of the SECUSO research group. Henrik has studied Industrial Design and Usability Engineering. He has worked for many years on the research questions of human-computer interaction in the context of assistant systems and their interaction design. As his research at SECUSO, Henrik will be working on the topic „Privacy through Interaction Design“.

The paper “I (don't) see what you typed there! Shoulder-surfing resistant password entry on gamepads” by Peter Mayer, Nina Gerber, Benjamin Reinheimer, Philipp Rack, Kristoffer Braun and Melanie Volkamer has been conditionally accepted for publication at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which will be held from 4th to 9th May 2019 in Glasgow, UK.

The paper „Erklärvideo “Online-Betrug” – Nach nur fünf Minuten Phishing E-Mails nachweislich signifikant besser erkennen“ by Melanie Volkamer, Karen Renaud, Benjamin Reinheimer, Marco Ghiglieri, Nina Gerber, Peter Mayer, Philipp Rack and Alexandra Kunz was selected for presentation at the 16th German IT security congress, which is organized by the BSI.

Our employees were at the start of the 3rd stage of "Digitalisation: Läuft!" in Karlsruhe on 16th November 2018. They represented both the KIT and KASTEL. On site was also Minister of Digitization Thomas Strobl, together with other employees of FZI, CyberForum and EnBW. The motto of the run was "security in the digital age". The stage led from the EnBW innovation campus to the newly launched "Cyberwehr des Landes am Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI)". The aim of the event was the transfer of knowledge and a general exchange on the subject of digitisation. The new open innovation platform will also be launched within the framework of this event.

The RFH Cologne organises the IT Security & Forensic Days for the second time. The aim is to increase the sensitivity for security in IT systems and to raise awareness of the primary topic. The event will include expert lectures, discussions and workshops on the topics of IT security, data protection and IT forensics. Benjamin Reinheimer will also hold a workshop on the subject of phishing and fraudulent messages. The audience, consisting of students, lecturers, alumni and experts from all sectors, will learn the essential rules for detecting phishing interactively and will be provided with support for its implementation in daily life.

The International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID) took place for the third time in Schloss Hofen in Bregenz, Austria. The conference hosted over 100 participants from five continents and provided a platform of talks and discussions among a variety of stakeholders, including academic researchers from different disciplines, practitioners and vendors. The pre-conference program included the PhD colloquium and demo session of voting systems.

The paper “On The Systematic Development and Evaluation Of Password Security Awareness-Raising Materials” by Peter Mayer, Christian Schwartz and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for publication at the 2018 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, which will be held December 3rd to 7th 2018 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA. The paper describes a process for the systematic development of awareness-raising materials, the application of that process for the creation of an awareness-raising material on the topic "protection of user accounts", as well as the evaluation of this material in three SMEs.

The European Cyber Security Month is coordinated by the German Federal Office of Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI). SECUSO participates together with KASTEL and SCC with new flyers, video on how to identify and avoid online fraud and new Privacy-Friendly Apps.

Our family of Privacy-Friendly Apps in Health category has grown. In addition to the existing apps (Pedometer, Interval Timer and Circuit Training, Pain Dairy), now there is also a Privacy Friendly Pausing Healthily App (available in Google Play Store and in F-Droid Store).The app has been developed in collaboration with a physiotherapist Eduardo Fontao. Just like the rest of our Privacy Friendly app, the Pausing Healthily only requests permissions that are necessary for its functionality (in this case, no permissions) and does not contain any tracking mechanisms, so that no (user) data is being collected. It is also free and yet does not show any ads. Privacy Friendly Pausing Healthily App makes it easier to structure your work by reminding you to take breaks during work. The app also offers many useful relaxation, mobilisation and stretching exercises that can be combined into individual programs.

The paper "A Proxy Voting Scheme Ensuring Participation Privacy and Receipt-Freeness" by Oksana Kulyk and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for publication at the 52. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52), which will take place on 8.-11. January in Grand Wailea, Maui. The conference is A-ranked according to CORE.

The paper "Nutzerwahrnehmung der Ende-zu-Ende-Verschlüsselung in WhatsApp" by Nina Gerber, Verena Zimmermann, Birgit Henhapl, Sinem Emeröz, Tobias Hilt and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for publication at the journal "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit".    

An extension for Google Chrome, “Privacy-friendly Cookie Settings”, designed to support the users in their cookie configuration, is available for download in Chrome Store. The extension aims to support the lay users by providing explanations for the available cookie settings, enables easier navigation through the settings via an assistant mode and supports fine-grained configuration with the possibility of website-specific settings.

As a little Easter surprise, we are happy to announce that our educational Video "Online-Fraud - How to identify and avoid dangers" is now also available in English. The popular five-minute video on the topic how to identify and avoid dangers by identifying them through education, is a result of scientific evaluation of the effectiveness in regard to the recognition of fraudulent messages. 

Happy Easter and stay safe, the SECUSO-Research Group

ACCESS - Authentication ChoiCE Support System - is a platform that helps developers and decision makers to select appropriate authentication schemes for their application scenarios. It allows specifying the requirements needed for an authentication scheme to be suitable. Then, the platform compares the requirements with the entries of its knowledge base and lists the five most suitable authentication schemes. The knowledge base contains data about a variety of authentication schemes from the scientific literature. ACCESS enables usage of this data by non-experts.

Prof. Melanie Volkamer, Professor at the SECUSO research group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Technische Universität Darmstadt is co-organizing the International Conference for Electronic Voting (E-VOTE-ID) 2018.

This conference is one of the leading international events for e-voting experts from all over the world. E-VOTE-ID is an annual meeting formed by merging EVOTE and VoteID. The third joint conference will take place in October 2018.

One of its major objectives is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary and open discussion of all issues relating to electronic voting. Cumulatively, since 2004 more than 750 experts from 35+ countries in six continents have attended this conference to discuss electronic voting and related topics.

The aim of the conference is to bring together e-voting specialists working in academia, politics, government and industry in order to discuss various aspects of all forms of electronic voting (including, but not limited, to polling stations, kiosks, ballot scanners and remote voting by electronic means) in three conference tracks and a PhD colloquium.

The E-Vote-ID 2018 will be held in Bregenz, Austria, on October 2-5, 2018.

Im Rahmen der Tagung des Unterarbeitskreises "IT-Sicherheit" des Vereins der Zentren für Kommunikationsverarbeitung in Forschung und Lehre (ZKI e.V.) an der Universität Konstanz gibt Dr. Marco Ghiglieri am 14.03.2018 einen Vortrag zum Thema "Wie Sie sich mit effektiven Maßnahmen gegen Phishing und andere gefährliche Nachrichten schützen können".

Materialien zum Thema "Phishing und andere gefährliche Nachrichten" wurden u.a. innerhalb des vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie im Rahmen der Initiative IT-Sicherheit in der Wirtschaft geförderten Projekts KMU AWARE entwickelt.

SECUSO just published five new Privacy Friendly Apps and two updates.The Privacy Friendly Apps are a group of Android apps that are optimized regarding privacy. All apps were developed within SECUSO's usable security and privacy lab by students. The lab aims to teach privacy-aware developed as well as app development.

The new apps are:
* Pain Diary: An app that facilitates recording pain related data like location and intensity of pain.
* Boardgame Clock: An app that supports the time management of boardgames.
* Checkers: A boardgame for one or two players.
* Circuit Training: An app that supports the user in circuit training via time tracking and exercise display.
* WiFi Manager: Automatic switching on an off of the device's WiFi depending on the user's location.

The updated apps are:
* Net Monitor: Monitoring the network traffic of installed apps without permissions.
* Todo-Liste: Managing of todo tasks.

Two papers were accepted for publication in workshops which are co-located with SOUPS: The paper "Home Sweet Home? Investigating users’ awareness ofsmart home privacy threats" by Nina Gerber, Benjamin Reinheimer and Melanie Volkamerwill be presented at the workshop An Interactive Workshop on the Human aspects ofSmarthome Security and Privacy (WSSP) and the paper “ACCESSv2: A Collaborative Authentication Research and Decision Support Platform" by Peter Mayer, Philip Stumpf, Thomas Weber and Melanie Volkamer will be presented at the workshop  Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication 2018 (WAY 2018). Furthermore, the posters "‘This Website Uses Cookies‘: Users' Perceptions and Reactions to the Cookie Disclaimer“ by Oksana Kulyk, Annika Hilt, Nina Gerber and Melanie Volkamer and "Addressing Misconceptions About Password Security Effectively" by Peter Mayer and Melanie Volkamer have been accepted for presentation at SOUPS 2018.

The paper " Phishing Detection: Developing and Evaluating a Five Minutes Security Awareness Video" by Melanie Volkamer, Karen Renaud, Benjamin Maximilian Reinheimer, Philipp Rack, Marco Ghiglieri, Peter Mayer, Alexandra Kunz, Nina Gerber has been accepted at the TrustBus 2018 (15th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business).

Heute findet bereits zum 19. Mal der weltweite Safer Internet Day statt. Auch das AIFB und KASTEL beteiligen sich am Aktionstag: Anlässlich des diesjährigen Tags für mehr Internetsicherheit haben wir unseren NoPhish Flyer erweitert, um Ihnen aufzuzeigen, wie Sie sich vor Online-Betrug im Allgemeinen schützen können.

Viel Spaß beim Nicht-Betrogen werden.

Link zum Flyer

The paper "Replication Study: A Cross-Country Field Observation Study of Real World PIN Usage at ATMs and in Various Electronic Payment Scenarios" by Melanie Volkamer, Andreas Gutmann, Karen Renaud, Paul Gerber, and Peter Mayer was accepted for publication at the USENIX conference Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), which represents the primary venue for research in usable privacy and usable security. The conference will be held August 12–14, 2018 in Baltimore (USA).

The paper „Finally Johnny Can Encrypt. But Does This Make Him Feel More Secure?” by Nina Gerber, Verena Zimmermann, Birgit Henhapl, Sinem Emeröz and Melanie Volkamer was accepted at the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), which will be held from August 27 to August 30 at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

The book 'Sicherheitskritische Mensch-Computer-Interaktion' has been published by Springer. It contains the chapter 'Human Factors in Security' by Paul Gerber, Marco Ghiglieri, Birgit Henhapl, Oksana Kulyk, Karola Marky, Peter Mayer, Benjamin Reinheimer and Melanie Volkamer. Therein, the authors provide an introduction in the topic of human factors in security and present general solutions based on the Human-Centered Security by Design approach.

On April 9th and 10th, Melanie Volkamer and Oksana Kulyk co-organised the 21st E-Voting Colloquium at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology together with the KASTEL professors Prof. Dr. Bernhard Beckert and Prof. Dr. Jörn Müller-Quade. 

Since 2006, the colloquium takes place in order to consider different aspects of E-Voting, such as legal hurdles, identity management, legal and technical aspects, costs and challenges of the verification of elections. In addition to presentations and discussions dedicated to the current state of research of the participating doctoral students, the highlight of this year's colloquium was the demo session of the voting machines from the SECUSO research group. The presented machines included the mechanical voting device 'System Darmstadt' and a NEDAP voting computer, both were used in the past for legally binding elections in Germany, yet are currently not allowed to be used for such elections anymore. Furthermore, the EasyVote system has been presented, which was developed within the SECUSO research group for elections that allow cumulative voting and panachage. 

The paper „Explaining the Privacy Paradox - A systematic review of literature investigating privacy attitude and behavior” by Nina Gerber, Paul Gerber and Melanie Volkamer was accepted for publication in the Computers & Security Journal.