Month: September 2019
Are Passwords for Web Authentication Obsolete? Leakage of Passwords and API-Keys and Possible Solutions
Hardly any service today works without an API that allows users to log in and then use features that are not available to unregistered users. To do this, the user can create an account that is password protected. Services such as the Google Maps API also provide access interfaces to allow application developers to easily…
Social Bots – An Attack on Democracy?
Election campaigns are increasingly carried out in social networks to influence voters. Social bots are being used for this purpose, which raises the question of how much influence they have on voters and whether they can even endanger a democracy. Furthermore, the question arises as to who can be held responsible for this and how…
Cryptomining Malware – How criminals use your devices to get wealthy!
Has your computer ever been slow and you couldn’t tell what the problem was? Nowadays, illicit cryptomining can cause those performance problems. It dethroned ransomware as the top cybersecurity threat in 2018. (Webroot Threat Report 2018) A simple website visit can start the mining process as a javascript running in the background of the browser…
The (in)security about speaker legitimacy detection
For the most of us, voices are a crucial part in our every-day communication. Whether we talk to other people over the phone or in real life, through different voices we’re able to distinguish our counterparts, convey different meanings with the same words, and – maybe most importantly – connect the voice we hear to…
Security and Usability: How to design secure systems people can use.
Security hit a high level of importance due to rising technological standards. Unfortunately it leads to a conflict with Usability as Security makes operations harder whereas Usability is supposed to make it easier. Many people are convinced that there is a tradeoff between them. This results in either secure systems that are not usable or…