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Digital networking now permeates almost all areas of life. Developing protective mechanisms is an urgent task.
Researchers from Bochum are particularly quick at finding security vulnerabilities in IT systems. Their trick: they focus on the essentials.
Using cloud services without running into trouble with the GDPR – the company Edgeless Systems makes it possible. Founder Dr. Felix Schuster reflects on the somewhat difficult entry into a new market.
Researchers reviewed 42 apps and found privacy and security deficiencies, some of which were quite serious. Some apps even sell their users’ data to third parties.
Up to now, protecting hardware against manipulation has been a laborious business: expensive, and only possible on a small scale. And yet, two simple antennas might do the trick.
Wirelessly functioning devices are omnipresent in our households. However, wireless communication endangers our privacy: Passive eavesdroppers are able to obtain sensitive data through intercepted high-frequency signals.
Artificial intelligence can imitate people’s voices. Scammers are already taking advantage of this on the phone. A team in Bochum is working on a solution.
Using so-called XS-Leaks, personal data can be accessed on the web. Many browsers are affected.
Popular unlocking patterns are often in the shape of a letter – and are easy to guess. A bad thing if someone loses their mobile phone and it ends up in the wrong hands.
For data protection reasons, the messaging app Signal is becoming ever more important. Unlike WhatsApp, the Signal app asks you to create a PIN during setup. But why?
Logging into an online shop without a password, using only the fingerprint? In this situation, it’s not surprising that users have the impression that their biometric data is transmitted to the website.
A research team has discovered a security gap in modern mobile phones that is very unlikely to have been created by accident. In fact, it should have been removed back in 2013.
Services like Google collect a lot of data about their users. Anyone can see the information that is stored about them. But that doesn’t scare users away. On the contrary.
A special feature in PDF documents makes it possible for two contractual parties to sign them digitally one after the other. However, the second party can also change the content of the contract unnoticed.
Amazon screens special voice assistant functions for security. However, scammers can circumvent this check – one of several problems.
For six years now, countless calls have been handled via the Voice over LTE telephone standard. The calls were not tap-proof.
In 2019, researchers identified vulnerabilities in PDF signature that enabled them to manipulate the content of documents unnoticed. Now, the team has shown that the countermeasures implemented are hardly effective.
This method exposes fake images created by computer algorithms rather than by humans.
“Alexa,” “Hey Siri,” “OK Google” – voice assistants are supposed to react to these triggers. But other words activate them, too.
FPGA chips are part of many safety-critical applications. They have one particular valuable feature: they are individually reprogrammable – but with this feature also comes a risk.
