Secure Internet Infrastructures
Enhancing the security of the Web
November 2023
Attitudes On Government Surveillance
What are people’s opinions on Internet-safety legislation?
In 2022, the EU has confirmed legislation mandating the implementation of chat control to help fight online child abuse. This has been met with public controversy. We were able to show that, for a general population sample from Germany, trust in physical entities (like law enforcement agencies) impacts the trust that the general population has in digital measures, even on occasion superseding concerns about the potential danger to individual privacy that such technology represents.
2 minutes
June 2023
F-PKI: The Flexible Public Key Infrastructure
Strengthening the web PKI through flexible trust
Our new Flexible Public-Key Infrastructure (F-PKI) allows users to define which certificate authorities (CAs) they consider highly trusted based on their individual trust preference. F-PKI mitigates the problem that all CAs are omnipotent in today’s Internet PKI, by preventing attacks by less trusted CAs on the certificates created by highly trusted CAs. This notion of trustworthiness also depends on the actual domain that is being validated, allowing users to also define the scope in which a CA is highly trusted (e.
2 minutes
ADEM: An Authentic Digital Emblem
How can we transfer the physical red cross into the digital world?
In times of armed conflict, the emblems of the red cross, red crescent, and red crystal are used to mark physical infrastructure. This enables military units to identify assets as protected under international humanitarian law to avoid attacking them. In 2020, we challenged ourselves with the novel security problem of how to extend such protection to digital, network-connected infrastructure through a digital emblem. In 2021, we finalized a first version proposal for a digital emblem, that we call ADEM: An Authentic Digital Emblem.
2 minutes