- Data and Application Security Group

Project MedISA has started

From patient records to diagnostic equipment, hospital care is based on the secure use and operation of information technology. In practice, however, insufficient awareness of information security among medical staff often poses a challenge to secure operations. As part of the MedISA (Medical Centre Employee Centered Information Security Awareness) research project, the DAS Group is developing strategies to raise awareness of IT security and data protection among employees in medical care facilities. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health (BMG). Associated partners are the Universitätsklinikum Aachen and the Universitätsklinikum Düsseldorf. Other institutions interested in participating are welcome to contact us.

More information about the project can be found here.

Paper on employees' privacy perceptions accepted for PETS 2022

The paper entitled “Employees’ privacy perceptions: exploring the dimensionality and antecedents of personal data sensitivity and willingness to disclose.” by Jan Tolsdorf, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Delphine Reinhardt and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Luigi Lo Iacono has been accepted for the 22nd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2022).

Risk-based Authentication privacy paper accepted at IWPE '21

The paper Privacy Considerations for Risk-Based Authentication (RBA) Systems by Stephan Wiefling, Jan Tolsdorf, and Luigi Lo Iacono was accepted at the 2021 International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE ‘21), co-located with 6th IEEE European European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P ‘21).

The work proposed and tested several mechanisms to enhance privacy in RBA models that are apparently used by the majority of online services on the Web. The full paper is available at our RBA website.

Paper published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

The paper “I just looked for the solution!” - On Integrating Security-Relevant Information in Non-Security API Documentation to Support Secure Coding Practices by Peter Leo Gorski, Sebastian Möller, Stephan Wiefling and Luigi Lo Iacono is published in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) journal.

The work shows an eye-tracking to investigate how developers use code examples in non-security API documentation. The observations suggest that developers mostly focused on code-examples, and that these significantly help to produce secure solutions.

Paper presented at IFIP SEC 2021

Two papers were recently published and presented at the IFIP SEC 2021 conference.

The paper XML Signature Wrapping Still Considered Harmful: A Case Study on the Personal Health Record in Germany by Paul Höller, Alexander Krumeich, and Luigi Lo Iacono found security weaknesses that can be exploited in the German personal health record.

The paper Less is Often More: Header Whitelisting as Semantic Gap Mitigation in HTTP-Based Software Systems by Andre Büttner, Hoai Viet Nguyen, Nils Gruschka, and Luigi Lo Iacono introduce the header whitelisting (HWL) approach to address the semantic gap in HTTP message processing pipelines.

Paper accepted at the 18th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business (TrustBUS 2021)

The paper entitled “Components and Architecture for the Implementation of Technology-driven Employee Data Protection” authored by Florian Dehling, Denis Feth, Svenja Polst, Bianca Steffes and Jan Tolsdorf has been accepted for presentation at the 18th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business (TrustBUS 2021).

The paper describes how to successfully implement technology-enabled employee data protection. It presents the necessary components and classifies them from a legal perspective. The paper concludes with an architectural concept that allows a gradual implementation of the components in order to ensure that companies become legally compliant at an early stage without being overburdened.

The paper summarizes some of the outcomes of the “TrUSD “ project, which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Article published in IEEE Security & Privacy

The article Verify It’s You: How Users Perceive Risk-based Authentication by Stephan Wiefling, Markus Dürmuth, and Luigi Lo Iacono is published at IEEE Security & Privacy.

The article covers the RBA usability study published at ACSAC 2020, but targeted towards a general audience. We also included some new results.

ODEA.5G project started

The ODEA.5G project has started as part of the 5G.NRW Competence Center. In the ODEA.5G project, the H-BRS University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne are setting up 5G campus networks at both universities to test and evaluate state-of-the-art e-assessment systems.

Paper on FIDO2 account recovery accepted at OID 2021

The paper “Evaluation of Account Recovery Strategies with FIDO2-based Passwordless Authentication” by Johannes Kunke, Stephan Wiefling, Markus Ullmann, and Luigi Lo Iacono was accepted for presentation at the Open Identity Summit 2021 (OID ‘21). The paper does a heuristic evaluation of 12 account recovery mechanisms regarding their properties for FIDO2 passwordless authentication. The conference will take place online June 1-2, 2021.

Paper accepted at the 9th Annual Privacy Forum (APF)

The paper entitled “A case study on the implementation of the right of access in privacy dashboards” authored by Jan Tolsdorf, Michael Fischer and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Luigi Lo Iacono has been accepted for presentation at the 9th Annual Privacy Forum (APF). The paper was based on the results of Michael Fischer’s bachelor thesis, in which he examined various privacy dashboards in terms of their compliance with the right of access.