News
We report on achievements and press coverage of our work here. You can follow us on Twitter to receive even more updates.
We won the Best Paper Award at ACM CSCW 2024
We are proud to announce that our paper "Sounds Good? Fast and Secure Contact Exchange in Groups" (Florentin Putz, Steffen Haesler, Matthias Hollick) has received a Best Paper Award (top 1%) at ACM CSCW 2024. Check out this demo video about our app PairSonic, and further information (PDF, code, dataset) about this project.
AirGuard for iOS - Protection against Unwanted Tracking
AirGuard enhances the security of iPhone users by detecting personal tracking devices such as Samsung SmartTags and Tile trackers. People affected of unwanted tracking get a notification in less than an hour and are can then use the app to search for the hidden tracker.
Three SEEMOO and WISE thesis students won the Datenlotsen-Preis 2021 and 2022
We are happy to announce that Andreas Bäuml, Lukas Magel and Ben-Jasper Kettlitz won the Datenlotsen-Preis from 2021 and 2022. Every year, up to four graduates from computer science, mathematics or industrial engineering are honored for their outstanding Bachelor's and Master's thesis. The prices were handed over during this year's ceremony which took place at the Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg-Haus on the 2nd of December.
AirGuard protects Android users from modern stalking methods
Our Android app AirGuard effectively helps to protect Android users from stalking attacks using Apple AirTags. The app has reached over 130,000 active installations, and several online media sites covered our app (CNET, heise, Spiegel).
BrakTooth affects iPhones and MacBooks
The newly released BrakTooth vulnerabilities also affect various Bluetooth chipsets that we analyzed in the past. We use our research frameworks - InternalBlue and Frankenstein - to make an in-depth assessment of these new vulnerabilities. Even though not listed by the BrakTooth researchers as of now, because Apple did not make the disclosure deadline, these vulnerabilities also affect iPhones and MacBooks. For more details, see our blog post.
Florentin Putz wins KuVS Best Thesis Award
Florentin Putz just won the Best Master's Thesis Award 2020 from KuVS for his research on ad-hoc acoustic communication. KuVS is the special interest group on Communication and Distributed Systems, which is jointly supported by the German Informatics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) and the Information Technology Society of VDE (Informationstechnische Gesellschaft, ITG).
Who can “Find My” devices?
It is supposed to make it easier to find Apple devices - but normally not for everyone. The offline finding system Find My from tech giant Apple is a tracking app that can find all of a user’s Apple devices, from MacBook to AirPod. Since the tracking relies on Bluetooth, it also works when the devices are offline or switched to flight mode. This is a practical function for all Apple users to see, for example, if one only forgot the iPhone in the office or if it actually fell from the pocket in the subway on the way home.
