Institut für Cyber Security & Privacy (ICSP)
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Ziel der neunten Ausgabe des wissenschaftlichen Workshops "Usable Security und Privacy" auf der Mensch und Computer 2023 ist es, aktuelle Forschungs- und Praxisbeiträge auf diesem Gebiet zu präsentieren und mit den Teilnehmer:innen zu diskutieren. Getreu dem Konferenzmotto "Building Bridges" soll mit dem Workshop ein etabliertes Forum fortgeführt und weiterentwickelt werden, in dem sich Expert:innen, Forscher:innen und Praktiker:innen aus unterschiedlichen Domänen transdisziplinär zum Thema Usable Security und Privacy austauschen können. Das Thema betrifft neben dem Usability- und Security-Engineering unterschiedliche Forschungsgebiete und Berufsfelder, z. B. Informatik, Ingenieurwissenschaften, Mediengestaltung und Psychologie. Der Workshop richtet sich an interessierte Wissenschaftler:innen aus all diesen Bereichen, aber auch ausdrücklich an Vertreter:innen der Wirtschaft, Industrie und öffentlichen Verwaltung.
Risikobasierte Authentifizierung (RBA) ist ein adaptiver Ansatz zur Stärkung der Passwortauthentifizierung. Er überwacht eine Reihe von Merkmalen, die sich auf das Loginverhalten während der Passworteingabe beziehen. Wenn sich die beobachteten Merkmalswerte signifikant von denen früherer Logins unterscheiden, fordert RBA zusätzliche Identitätsnachweise an. Regierungsbehörden und ein Erlass des US-Präsidenten empfehlen RBA, um Onlineaccounts vor Angriffen mit gestohlenen Passwörtern zu schützen. Trotz dieser Tatsachen litt RBA unter einem Mangel an offenem Wissen. Es gab nur wenige bis keine Untersuchungen über die Usability, Sicherheit und Privatsphäre von RBA. Das Verständnis dieser Aspekte ist jedoch wichtig für eine breite Akzeptanz.
Diese Arbeit soll ein umfassendes Verständnis von RBA mit einer Reihe von Studien vermitteln. Die Ergebnisse ermöglichen es, datenschutzfreundliche RBA-Lösungen zu schaffen, die die Authentifizierung stärken bei gleichzeitig hoher Menschenakzeptanz.
Risk-Based Authentication for OpenStack: A Fully Functional Implementation and Guiding Example
(2023)
Online services have difficulties to replace passwords with more secure user authentication mechanisms, such as Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This is partly due to the fact that users tend to reject such mechanisms in use cases outside of online banking. Relying on password authentication alone, however, is not an option in light of recent attack patterns such as credential stuffing.
Risk-Based Authentication (RBA) can serve as an interim solution to increase password-based account security until better methods are in place. Unfortunately, RBA is currently used by only a few major online services, even though it is recommended by various standards and has been shown to be effective in scientific studies. This paper contributes to the hypothesis that the low adoption of RBA in practice can be due to the complexity of implementing it. We provide an RBA implementation for the open source cloud management software OpenStack, which is the first fully functional open source RBA implementation based on the Freeman et al. algorithm, along with initial reference tests that can serve as a guiding example and blueprint for developers.
Digital ecosystems are driving the digital transformation of business models. Meanwhile, the associated processing of personal data within these complex systems poses challenges to the protection of individual privacy. In this paper, we explore these challenges from the perspective of digital ecosystems' platform providers. To this end, we present the results of an interview study with seven data protection officers representing a total of 12 digital ecosystems in Germany. We identified current and future challenges for the implementation of data protection requirements, covering issues on legal obligations and data subject rights. Our results support stakeholders involved in the implementation of privacy protection measures in digital ecosystems, and form the foundation for future privacy-related studies tailored to the specifics of digital ecosystems.
Login Data Set for Risk-Based Authentication
Synthesized login feature data of >33M login attempts and >3.3M users on a large-scale online service in Norway. Original data collected between February 2020 and February 2021.
This data sets aims to foster research and development for <a href="https://riskbasedauthentication.org">Risk-Based Authentication (RBA) systems. The data was synthesized from the real-world login behavior of more than 3.3M users at a large-scale single sign-on (SSO) online service in Norway.
Ziel der achten Auflage des wissenschaftlichen Workshops “Usable Security and Privacy” auf der Mensch und Computer 2022 ist es, aktuelle Forschungs- und Praxisbeiträge zu präsentieren und anschließend mit den Teilnehmenden zu diskutieren. Der Workshop soll ein etabliertes Forum fortführen und weiterentwickeln, in dem sich Experten aus verschiedenen Bereichen, z. B. Usability und Security Engineering, transdisziplinär austauschen können.
Auch die mittlerweile siebte Ausgabe des wissenschaftlichen Workshops “Usable Security und Privacy” auf der Mensch und Computer 2021 wird aktuelle Forschungs- und Praxisbeiträge präsentiert und anschließend mit allen Teilnehmer:innen diskutiert. Zwei Beiträge befassen sich dieses Jahr mit dem Thema Privatsphäre, zwei mit dem Thema Sicherheit. Mit dem Workshop wird ein etabliertes Forum fortgeführt und weiterentwickelt, in dem sich Expert:innen aus unterschiedlichen Domänen, z. B. dem Usability- und Security- Engineering, transdisziplinär austauschen können.
The processing of employee personal data is dramatically increasing. To protect employees' fundamental right to privacy, the law provides for the implementation of privacy controls, including transparency and intervention. At present, however, the stakeholders responsible for putting these obligations into action, such as employers and software engineers, simply lack the fundamental knowledge needed to design and implement the necessary controls. Indeed, privacy research has so far focused mainly on consumer relations in the private context. In contrast, privacy in the employment context is less well studied. However, since privacy is highly context-dependent, existing knowledge and privacy controls from other contexts cannot simply be adopted to the employment context. In particular, privacy in employment is subject to different legal and social norms, which require a different conceptualization of the right to privacy than is usual in other contexts. To adequately address these aspects, there is broad consensus that privacy must be regarded as a socio-technical concept in which human factors must be considered alongside technical-legal factors. Today, however, there is a particular lack of knowledge about human factors in employee privacy. Disregarding the needs and concerns of individuals or lack of usability, though, are common reasons for the failure of privacy and security measures in practice. This dissertation addresses key knowledge gaps on human factors in employee privacy by presenting the results of a total of three in-depth studies with employees in Germany. The results provide insights into employees' perceptions of the right to privacy, as well as their perceptions and expectations regarding the processing of employee personal data. The insights gained provide a foundation for the human-centered design and implementation of employee-centric privacy controls, i.e., privacy controls that incorporate the views, expectations, and capabilities of employees. Specifically, this dissertation presents the first mental models of employees on the right to informational self-determination, the German equivalent of the right to privacy. The results provide insights into employees' (1) perceptions of categories of data, (2) familiarity and expectations of the right to privacy, and (3) perceptions of data processing, data flow, safeguards, and threat models. In addition, three major types of mental models are presented, each with a different conceptualization of the right to privacy and a different desire for control. Moreover, this dissertation provides multiple insights into employees' perceptions of data sensitivity and willingness to disclose personal data in employment. Specifically, it highlights the uniqueness of the employment context compared to other contexts and breaks down the multi-dimensionality of employees' perceptions of personal data. As a result, the dimensions in which employees perceive data are presented, and differences among employees are highlighted. This is complemented by identifying personal characteristics and attitudes toward employers, as well as toward the right to privacy, that influence these perceptions. Furthermore, this dissertation provides insights into practical aspects for the implementation of personal data management solutions to safeguard employee privacy. Specifically, it presents the results of a user-centered design study with employees who process personal data of other employees as part of their job. Based on the results obtained, a privacy pattern is presented that harmonizes privacy obligations with personal data processing activities. The pattern is useful for designing privacy controls that help these employees handle employee personal data in a privacy-compliant manner, taking into account their skills and knowledge, thus helping to protect employee privacy. The outcome of this dissertation benefits a wide range of stakeholders who are involved in the protection of employee privacy. For example, it highlights the challenges to be considered by employers and software engineers when conceptualizing and designing employee-centric privacy controls. Policymakers and researchers gain a better understanding of employees' perceptions of privacy and obtain fundamental knowledge for future research into theoretical and abstract concepts or practical issues of employee privacy. Employers, IT engineers, and researchers gain insights into ways to empower data processing employees to handle employee personal data in a privacy-compliant manner, enabling employers to improve and promote compliance. Since the basic principles underlying informational self-determination have been incorporated into European privacy legislation, we are confident that our results are also of relevance to stakeholders outside Germany.
Graph databases employ graph structures such as nodes, attributes and edges to model and store relationships among data. To access this data, graph query languages (GQL) such as Cypher are typically used, which might be difficult to master for end-users. In the context of relational databases, sequence to SQL models, which translate natural language questions to SQL queries, have been proposed. While these Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models increase the accessibility of relational databases, NMT models for graph databases are not yet available mainly due to the lack of suitable parallel training data. In this short paper we sketch an architecture which enables the generation of synthetic training data for the graph query language Cypher.
Risk-based authentication (RBA) aims to protect users against attacks involving stolen passwords. RBA monitors features during login, and requests re-authentication when feature values widely differ from those previously observed. It is recommended by various national security organizations, and users perceive it more usable than and equally secure to equivalent two-factor authentication. Despite that, RBA is still used by very few online services. Reasons for this include a lack of validated open resources on RBA properties, implementation, and configuration. This effectively hinders the RBA research, development, and adoption progress.
To close this gap, we provide the first long-term RBA analysis on a real-world large-scale online service. We collected feature data of 3.3 million users and 31.3 million login attempts over more than 1 year. Based on the data, we provide (i) studies on RBA’s real-world characteristics plus its configurations and enhancements to balance usability, security, and privacy; (ii) a machine learning–based RBA parameter optimization method to support administrators finding an optimal configuration for their own use case scenario; (iii) an evaluation of the round-trip time feature’s potential to replace the IP address for enhanced user privacy; and (iv) a synthesized RBA dataset to reproduce this research and to foster future RBA research. Our results provide insights on selecting an optimized RBA configuration so that users profit from RBA after just a few logins. The open dataset enables researchers to study, test, and improve RBA for widespread deployment in the wild.
The processing of employees’ personal data is dramatically increasing, yet there is a lack of tools that allow employees to manage their privacy. In order to develop these tools, one needs to understand what sensitive personal data are and what factors influence employees’ willingness to disclose. Current privacy research, however, lacks such insights, as it has focused on other contexts in recent decades. To fill this research gap, we conducted a cross-sectional survey with 553 employees from Germany. Our survey provides multiple insights into the relationships between perceived data sensitivity and willingness to disclose in the employment context. Among other things, we show that the perceived sensitivity of certain types of data differs substantially from existing studies in other contexts. Moreover, currently used legal and contextual distinctions between different types of data do not accurately reflect the subtleties of employees’ perceptions. Instead, using 62 different data elements, we identified four groups of personal data that better reflect the multi-dimensionality of perceptions. However, previously found common disclosure antecedents in the context of online privacy do not seem to affect them. We further identified three groups of employees that differ in their perceived data sensitivity and willingness to disclose, but neither in their privacy beliefs nor in their demographics. Our findings thus provide employers, policy makers, and researchers with a better understanding of employees’ privacy perceptions and serve as a basis for future targeted research
on specific types of personal data and employees.
We benchmark the robustness of maximum likelihood based uncertainty estimation methods to outliers in training data for regression tasks. Outliers or noisy labels in training data results in degraded performances as well as incorrect estimation of uncertainty. We propose the use of a heavy-tailed distribution (Laplace distribution) to improve the robustness to outliers. This property is evaluated using standard regression benchmarks and on a high-dimensional regression task of monocular depth estimation, both containing outliers. In particular, heavy-tailed distribution based maximum likelihood provides better uncertainty estimates, better separation in uncertainty for out-of-distribution data, as well as better detection of adversarial attacks in the presence of outliers.
Die Blockchain-Technologie ist einer der großen Innovationstreiber der letzten Jahre. Mit einer zugrundeliegenden Blockchain-Technologie ist auch der Betrieb von verteilten Anwendungen, sogenannter Decentralized Applications (DApps), bereits technisch umsetzbar. Dieser Beitrag verfolgt das Ziel, Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten der digitalen Verbraucherteilhabe an Blockchain-Anwendungen zu untersuchen. Hierzu enthält der Beitrag eine Einführung in die digitale Verbraucherteilhabe und die technischen Grundlagen und Eigenschaften der Blockchain-Technologie, einschließlich darauf basierender DApps. Abschließend werden technische, ethisch-organisatorische, rechtliche und sonstige Anforderungsbereiche für die Umsetzung von digitaler Verbraucherteilhabe in Blockchain-Anwendungen adressiert.
Risk-based authentication (RBA) extends authentication mechanisms to make them more robust against account takeover attacks, such as those using stolen passwords. RBA is recommended by NIST and NCSC to strengthen password-based authentication, and is already used by major online services. Also, users consider RBA to be more usable than two-factor authentication and just as secure. However, users currently obtain RBA's high security and usability benefits at the cost of exposing potentially sensitive personal data (e.g., IP address or browser information). This conflicts with user privacy and requires to consider user rights regarding the processing of personal data. We outline potential privacy challenges regarding different attacker models and propose improvements to balance privacy in RBA systems. To estimate the properties of the privacy-preserving RBA enhancements in practical environments, we evaluated a subset of them with long-term data from 780 users of a real-world online service. Our results show the potential to increase privacy in RBA solutions. However, it is limited to certain parameters that should guide RBA design to protect privacy. We outline research directions that need to be considered to achieve a widespread adoption of privacy preserving RBA with high user acceptance.
Components and Architecture for the Implementation of Technology-Driven Employee Data Protection
(2021)
Target meaning representations for semantic parsing tasks are often based on programming or query languages, such as SQL, and can be formalized by a context-free grammar. Assuming a priori knowledge of the target domain, such grammars can be exploited to enforce syntactical constraints when predicting logical forms. To that end, we assess how syntactical parsers can be integrated into modern encoder-decoder frameworks. Specifically, we implement an attentional SEQ2SEQ model that uses an LR parser to maintain syntactically valid sequences throughout the decoding procedure. Compared to other approaches to grammar-guided decoding that modify the underlying neural network architecture or attempt to derive full parse trees, our approach is conceptually simpler, adds less computational overhead during inference and integrates seamlessly with current SEQ2SEQ frameworks. We present preliminary evaluation results against a recurrent SEQ2SEQ baseline on GEOQUERY and ATIS and demonstrate improved performance while enforcing grammatical constraints.
A qualitative study of Machine Learning practices and engineering challenges in Earth Observation
(2021)
Machine Learning (ML) is ubiquitously on the advance. Like many domains, Earth Observation (EO) also increasingly relies on ML applications, where ML methods are applied to process vast amounts of heterogeneous and continuous data streams to answer socially and environmentally relevant questions. However, developing such ML- based EO systems remains challenging: Development processes and employed workflows are often barely structured and poorly reported. The application of ML methods and techniques is considered to be opaque and the lack of transparency is contradictory to the responsible development of ML-based EO applications. To improve this situation a better understanding of the current practices and engineering-related challenges in developing ML-based EO applications is required. In this paper, we report observations from an exploratory study where five experts shared their view on ML engineering in semi-structured interviews. We analysed these interviews with coding techniques as often applied in the domain of empirical software engineering. The interviews provide informative insights into the practical development of ML applications and reveal several engineering challenges. In addition, interviewees participated in a novel workflow sketching task, which provided a tangible reflection of implicit processes. Overall, the results confirm a gap between theoretical conceptions and real practices in ML development even though workflows were sketched abstractly as textbook-like. The results pave the way for a large-scale investigation on requirements for ML engineering in EO.
In Fortführung zu den drei erfolgreichen „Usable Security und Privacy“ Workshops der letzten drei Jahre, sollen in einem vierten ganztätigen wissenschaftlichen Workshop auf der diesjährigen Mensch und Computer sechs bis acht Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet Usable Security and Privacy vorgestellt und diskutiert werden. Vorgesehen sind Beiträge aus Forschung und Praxis, die neue nutzerzentrierte Ansätze aber auch praxisrelevante Lösungen zur nutzerzentrierten Entwicklung und Ausgestaltung von digitalen Schutzmechanismen thematisieren. Mit dem Workshop soll das etablierte Forum weiterentwickelt werden, in dem sich Experten aus unterschiedlichen Domänen, z. B. dem Usability-Engineering und Security-Engineering, transdisziplinär austauschen können. Der Workshop wird von den Organisatoren als klassischer wissenschaftlicher Workshop ausgestaltet. Ein Programmkomitee bewertet die Einreichungen und wählt daraus die zur Präsentation akzeptierten Beiträge aus. Diese werden zudem im Poster- und Workshopband der Mensch und Computer 2018 veröffentlicht.
Helping Johnny to Analyze Malware: A Usability-Optimized Decompiler and Malware Analysis User Study
(2016)
Recent years have seen extensive adoption of domain generation algorithms (DGA) by modern botnets. The main goal is to generate a large number of domain names and then use a small subset for actual C&C communication. This makes DGAs very compelling for botmasters to harden the infrastructure of their botnets and make it resilient to blacklisting and attacks such as takedown efforts. While early DGAs were used as a backup communication mechanism, several new botnets use them as their primary communication method, making it extremely important to study DGAs in detail.
In this paper, we perform a comprehensive measurement study of the DGA landscape by analyzing 43 DGAbased malware families and variants. We also present a taxonomy for DGAs and use it to characterize and compare the properties of the studied families. By reimplementing the algorithms, we pre-compute all possible domains they generate, covering the majority of known and active DGAs. Then, we study the registration status of over 18 million DGA domains and show that corresponding malware families and related campaigns can be reliably identified by pre-computing future DGA domains. We also give insights into botmasters’ strategies regarding domain registration and identify several pitfalls in previous takedown efforts of DGA-based botnets. We will share the dataset for future research and will also provide a web service to check domains for potential DGA identity.
Der Arbeitskreis Usable Security & Privacy bietet ein Forum für den Gedankenaustausch und die interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit rund um das Thema benutzerfreundliche Informationssicherheit und privatheitsfördernde Technologien. Sicherheit ist bei der Anschaffung von Software und Technikprodukten zwar eines der zentralen Auswahlkriterien – aufgrund mangelnder Gebrauchstauglichkeit werden die vorhandenen Sicherheitsfunktionen und -mechanismen von den Nutzern jedoch oft falsch oder überhaupt nicht bedient. Im alltäglichen Gebrauch ergeben sich hierdurch Sicherheitsgefährdungen beim Umgang mit IKT-Systemen bzw. -Produkten und den darin enthaltenen sensiblen Daten. Im Workshop werden mit den Teilnehmern Beispiele diskutiert und es wird gemeinsam ein Stimmungsbild zum Verständnis, zum Stellenwert und zum aktuellen Grad der Umsetzung von Usable Security & Privacy erhoben. Ergebnis des Workshops ist ein Positionspapier, in dem die aktuellen Problemfelder und die wichtigsten Herausforderungen aus Sicht der Usability und UX Professionals beschrieben sind.
In Fortführung zum erfolgreichen Auftaktworkshop „Usable Security and Privacy: Nutzerzentrierte Lösungsansätze zum Schutz sensibler Daten“ auf der Mensch und Computer 2015 werden in einem zweiten wissenschaftlichen Workshop auf der diesjährigen Mensch und Computer vier Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet Usable Security and Privacy vorgestellt und diskutiert. Das Programm bilden Beiträge aus Forschung und Praxis, die neue nutzerzentrierte Ansätze, aber auch praxisrelevante Lösungen zur nutzerzentrierten Entwicklung und Ausgestaltung von digitalen Schutzmechanismen thematisieren. Mit dem Workshop wird das etablierte Forum weiterentwickelt, in dem sich Experten aus unterschiedlichen Domänen, z. B. dem Usability-Engineering und Security-Engineering, transdisziplinär austauschen können. Der Workshop wird von den Organisatoren als klassischer wissenschaftlicher Workshop ausgestaltet. Ein Programmkomitee hat die Einreichungen bewertet und daraus die zur Präsentation akzeptierten Beiträge ausgewählt.
In education, finding the appropriate learning pace that fits to the members of a large group is a challenging task. This becomes especially evident when teaching multidisciplinary subjects such as epidemiology in medicine or computer science in most study programs, since lecturers have to face a very heterogeneous state of previous knowledge. Approaching this issue requires an individual supervision of each and every student, which is obviously bounded by the available resources. Moreover, when referring back to the second example, writing computer programs requires a complex installation and configuration of development tools. Many beginning programmers already become stuck at this entry stage. This paper introduces WHELP, a Web-based Holistic E-Learning Platform, which provides an integrated environment enabling the learning and teaching of computer science topics without the need to install any software. Moreover, WHELP includes an interactive feedback system for each programming exercise, where lecturers or tutors can supply comments, improvements, code assistance or tips helping the students to accomplish their tasks. Furthermore, WHELP offers a statistical analysis module as well as a real-time classroom polling system both promoting an overview of the state of knowledge of a course. In addition to that, WHELP enables collaborative working including code-sharing and peer-to-peer learning. This feature enables students to work on exercises simultaneously at distinct places. WHELP has been successfully deployed in the winter term 2013 at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences supporting the 120 students and 3 lecturers to learn and teach basic topics of computer science in an engineering study program.