The term “Smart Home” is to be understood as the part of the Internet of Things that will increasingly influence the daily lives of users in their own homes. There are many technical approaches and standards on how to connect devices within the home and to the Internet, but no technology has yet taken a lead in the market.

Against this background, there is the opportunity to introduce robust IT security in cooperation with the practice partner Power Plus Communications AG in an early stage of the developement of products and standards. Since all smart home applications are “human-centered”, this must also hold for the IT security used there.

Two PhD projects deal with this topic in the context of the tandem “IT security in Smart Home networks in conjunction with Smart Metering systems”. In addition, a close cooperation with the tandem CONSENT is planned. Both tandems have thematic overlaps in the Smart Home and Smart Grid areas, from which meaningful synergy effects can be derived.

Principal Investigators (PIs)

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Gerd Bumiller
Lehrgebiet Energie- und Informationstechnik
Institut für Informatik
Hochschule Ruhr-West

Prof. Dr. Jörg Schwenk
Lehrstuhl für Netz- und Datensicherheit
Horst Görtz Institut für IT-Sicherheit
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

PhD Students

Jens Müller
Ruhr-Uni­ver­si­tät Bo­chum
Lehr­stuhl für Netz- und Da­ten­si­cher­heit
@jensvoid

Stefan Hoffmann
Lehrgebiet Energie- und Informationstechnik
Institut für Informatik
Hochschule Ruhr-West
@sg_hoffmann

Publications

  • Müller, Jens, Dominik Noss, Christian Mainka, Vladislav Mladenov, and Jörg Schwenk. “Processing Dangerous Paths– On Security and Privacy of the Portable Document Format.” In NDSS 2021.
  • Hoffmann, Stefan, Jens Müller, Gerd Bumiller, and Jörg Schwenk. 2020. “Powerless Security – A Security Analysis of in-Home Powerline Communications Based on HomePlug AV2.” In Proc. 18th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2020).
  • Müller, Jens, Fabian Ising, Christian Mainka, Vladislav Mladenov, and Sebastian Schinzel. “Office Document Security and Privacy.” WOOT 2020.
  • Müller, Jens, Damian Poddebniak, Sebastian Schinzel, and Jörg Schwenk. “Mailto: Me Your Secrets. On Bugs and Features in Email End-to-End Encryption.” In Proc. 8th IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2020).
  • Schwenk, Jörg, Marcus Brinkmann, Damian Poddebniak, Jens Müller, Juraj Somorovsky, and Sebastian Schinzel. “Mitigation of Attacks on Email End-to-End Encryption.” In CCS 2020.
  • Müller, Jens, Marcus Brinkmann, Damian Poddebniak, Sebastian Schinzel, and Jörg Schwenk. 2019. “Re: What’s Up Johnny?: Covert Content Attacks on Email End-to-End Encryption.” In Applied Cryptography and Network Security, edited by Robert H. Deng, Valérie Gauthier-Umaña, Martín Ochoa, and Moti Yung
  • Müller, Jens, Marcus Brinkmann, Damian Poddebniak, Hanno Böck, Sebastian Schinzel, Juraj Somorovsky, and Jörg Schwenk. “‘Johnny, You Are Fired!’ – Spoofing OpenPGP and S/MIME Signatures in Emails.” In USENIX Security 2019
  • Müller, Jens, Fabian Ising, Vladislav Mladenov, Christian Mainka, Sebastian Schinzel, and Jörg Schwenk. “Practical Decryption ExFiltration: Breaking PDF Encryption.” In CCS 2019
  • Stefan Hoffmann, Gerd Bumiller, “Identification and Simulation of a Denial-of-Sleep Attack on Open Metering System”, ISGT Europe 2019.
  • Poddebniak, Damian, Christian Dresen, Jens Müller, Fabian Ising, Sebastian Schinzel, Simon Friedberger, Juraj Somorovsky, and Jörg Schwenk. 2018. “Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption Using Exfiltration Channels.” In USENIX Security 2018.
  • Müller, Jens, Vladislav Mladenov, Dennis Felsch, and Jörg Schwenk. “PostScript Undead: Pwning the Web with a 35 Years Old Language.” In Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses, edited by Michael Bailey, Thorsten Holz, Manolis Stamatogiannakis, and Sotiris Ioannidis, 603–22. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing.