News

APNIC blog discusses the recent proposal of ATHENE researchers to distribute the power of RPKI authorities
Internet infrastructure is still very vulnerable. Security enhancements such as Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) are based on cryptographic signatures. While private keys should theoretically be held by the owners of domains and Internet name resources, they are outsourced to centralised authorities in practice. This bearsconsiderable security risks.
In his post, ATHENE researcher Kris Shrishak, TU Darmstadt, proposes a change to RPKI that will strengthen the threat model and prevent unilateral takedown of IP prefixes by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

ATHENE researcher becomes part of ProProfessur promotion program
ATHENE researcher Dr Juliane Krämer of the TU Darmstadt was admitted to the subsidy program ProProfessur by Mentoring Hessen. The program supports and backs advanced researchers on their way to professorship.
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How secure is Machine Learning?
The value of security and privacy in machine learning approaches has been investigated by researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and the Freie Universität Berlin in a joined study. Participants who work professionally or personally with machine learning approaches are still needed for the research project.
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ATHENE researchers at TU Darmstadt discover weaknesses in WLAN and Bluetooth chips
The ATHENE researchers Prof. Matthias Hollick and Dr. -Ing. Jiska Classen from the TU Darmstadt, cooperating with and Prof. Francesco Gringoli from the University of Brescia, Italy, have discovered vulnerabilities in chips that have not been given much attention by IT security research so far. The three IT security experts were able to show that hacker attacks via Bluetooth can escalate to the point where the damage transcends the original spot of occurrence and affects other areas.
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Making cyber-risks measurable
Since July, the LocateRisk project led by Lukas Baumann and his team has received a sum of 0.73 million euros through the BMBF subsidy program StartUpSecure. The existing startup wants to expand its project for its analytic system that evaluates attacking risks for businesses, and aims to provide small and medium-sized businesses with affordable alternatives to complicated, high-cost manual security audits. This innovative business venture does not only portray security risks within their own business, but it also initially monitors any available data of third parties, for example external service providers or business partners.
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ATHENE researcher joins BMBF project “Scale4Edge”
Following the announcement of the BMBF platform “ZuSE” (“Zukunftsfähige Spezialprozessoren und Entwicklungsplattformen”), three more projects launched recently, including “Scale4Edge”, in which ATHENE researcher Prof Andreas Koch represents the TU Darmstadt as one of the applicants.
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„Proof of Concept“ grant for ATHENE researcher
Prof Jan Peters of the TU Darmstadt has been awarded with a “Proof of Concept” grant in the amount of 150.000 Euro by the European Research Council (ERC). He received the prize for his project “AssemblySkills”, which aims to provide robots with the skill of autonomous learning using Artificial Intelligence.
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Conference radar for cybersecurity
ATHENE helps researchers to plan their scientific publications more easily. For this purpose, a comprehensive overview of the most important scientific conferences on cybersecurity and privacy is available at https://www.athene-center.de/cfp, which can be filtered by event date and submission deadline. Additional filtering options allow for quickly finding suitable publication opportunities of various research topics, while taking into account the scientific reputation of each event listed.
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Paper accepted
Various scientific papers by ATHENE researchers of the TU Darmstadt and the Fraunhofer SIT have been accepted at the 25th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2020
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ATHENE researcher becomes part of program chair for CANS 2020
Dr Haya Shulman of the Fraunhofer SIT is part of the program chair of this year’s International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security, CANS for short. Besides that, ATHENE is one of the supporters of the conference, whose focus lies on aspects of cryptology and data security, as well as network and computer security.
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