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Forschungsgruppe

Backes

Die Forschungsgruppe wird von CISPA-CEO und Gründungsdirektor Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Michael Backes geleitet und befasst sich mit verschiedenen Aspekten der IT-Sicherheit und des Datenschutzes, mit aktuell einem starken Fokus auf die Schnittstelle zwischen Informationssicherheit und künstlicher Intelligenz. Das Forschungsspektrum der Gruppe reicht vom Design, der Analyse und Verifikation von Protokollen und Systemen über Mechanismen zum Schutz der Privatsphäre von Endnutzer:innen und die Erforschung neuer Angriffsvektoren bis hin zu universellen Lösungen in der Software- und Netzwerksicherheit.

Gruppenleiter:in

Michael Backes

E-Mail

Adresse

Stuhlsatzenhaus 5
66123 Saarbrücken (Germany)

Neueste Veröffentlichungen

Jahr 2024

Konferenz / Medium

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Konferenz / Medium

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Konferenz / Medium

European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)

PROJECTS

The common practice of exploitable software which becomes patched, creates a cat-and-mouse game that cannot be tolerated in the presence of critical infrastructure or personal data.
In order to mitigate this cat-and-mouse game, we need new technologies that revolutionize the way systems are build and maintained. Our research area tackles this problem by giving foundations for the system design that incorporate security-by-design and methods for the analysis of existing systems. We currently in particular have a strong focus on conceptually understanding adversarial machine learning and its implications on security-critical systems.

With the advent of Online Social Networks and other Online Services, users, often unknowingly, publicly disseminate tremendous amounts of personal information through their online interactions. All of this information is then readily available to data collectors which use it for personal gain or for malicious actions against the user.
Protection of personal data is therefore of paramount importance in a day and age where data disseminated in the Internet, is completely visible and available to anyone who wants to collect it. In our group we develop foundational methods for quantifying privacy and anonymity in the Internet. Our methods allow for the analysis of existing privacy-enhancing technologies, but also for the development of novel, privacy-enhancing solutions. A particular focus at the moment is privacy assessment and protection for genetic data.

Not only smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous but also everyday household appliances and infrastructure have been computerized – or became ‘smart’. The endless possibilities of app stores have brought diversity and ingenuity to the way we interact with our world. However, the simplicity of developing and distributing apps together with their omnipresence has made it easy for attackers to gain access to our most personal data or extort us, all under the pretext of being a helpful app.
We conduct research as to how to protect user’s data and privacy on mobile, embedded, and other’smart’ devices, we analyse attacks and data breaches and we construct more secure operating systems.

Usable security and privacy research became an important field of research over the last decade. While many IT security mechanisms offer (very) strong security guarantees in theory, humans are a limiting factor in many cases. Choosing secure passwords, understanding and adhering SSL warning messages or encrypting email is a tough challenge for end users. Developers struggle with using secure cryptographic APIs and webmasters are overwhelmed with configuring X.509 certificates. We collect real data from real users of IT security systems and then build systems to help users make sensible decisions.