2023-02-14, Braunschweig
Hacklab is over and the results are in! This time even more participants took on our challenges and proved their knowledge and skill in IT-security. We're happy and proud that the course received such positive feedback again.
To finish the semester off, we've met up at our award ceremony honouring the exceptional performance of the top of the leaderboard. After giving some insight into our perspective on the technical side of the course, we opened the discussion about different solutions and approaches to the tasks. We had a great time and really hope you did as well!
The Hacklab (Praktikum IT-Sicherheit 2), together with Seclab (Praktikum IT-Sicherheit), is a practical IT-security course inspired by Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions. Over the course of six units students hack small, vulnerable applications demonstrating their knowledge of common vulnerability classes and ability to craft exploits. Armed with the insights of the attacker's perspective, students become aware of possible pitfalls in software development.
If you missed the course this semester, you get another chance on the Hacklab next year in WS 2023/24. Additionally, we're offering the Seclab in SS 2023, which serves as a good foundation. See you there!
2022-12-29, remote
Malte Wessels, IAS master's graduate Benjamin Altpeter, and Lorenz Sieben gave their talk "Trackers in mobile apps and their legality—A look at the mobile tracking landscape" at FireShonks, representing both the IAS and Datenanfragen.de e.V.
FireShonks is one of the decentralized end-of-year events organized by the chaos community.
They presented a technical deep dive into the current mobile tracking landscape, presenting research from the IAS including Benjamin's master thesis as well as additional research done for Datenanfragen.de e. V.
After covering the technical challenges associated with privacy studies on Android and iOS, as well as discussing their results and examples of privacy violations, they discussed the legal implications and counter-measures.
The talk was recorded. It was held in German, English dub is available. Slides are available at Datenanfragen.de.
2022-11-25, Braunschweig
We are thrilled to announce that Marius Musch has successfully defended his dissertation and is now the IAS’s first doctor. We would like to congratulate Marius that his excellent work and dedication has payed off, and we wish him continued success in his future endeavors.
2022-09-10, Munich
Our colleagues Jannik Hartung and Tobias Jost represented the IAS at the Deutschlands Bester Hacker hacking challenge finals in Munich after finishing the qualifiers in the Top 25.
The inaugural rendition of the hacking and IT security challenge Deutschlands Bester Hacker featured 300 participants from all over Germany. After three online qualification rounds, the top 25 hackers met in Munich for the final hacking challenge.
Jannik and Tobias showed their practical skills and knowledge, representing the IAS. As Deutschlands Bester Hacker will return in 2023 and will be open for everybody to participate, we recommend our hands-on course Praktikum IT-Sicherheit 2: Hacklab and Praktikum IT-Sicherheit: Seclab offered by our friends at the Institute of System Security as preparation :) .
2022-08-10, Boston
Marius Musch presented our work "U Can’t Debug This: Detecting JavaScript Anti-Debugging Techniques in the Wild" at Usenix Security 2022 in Boston, USA.
Since the conference was held virtually last year, all authors of full papers were invited to bring a poster of their published work to this year's in-person conference.
In the paper and correspondig poster, we explore the phenomenon of Anti-Debugging techniques written in JavaScript. This means, techniques that prevent the manual, dynamic analysis of websites. We discuss nine different of these techniques und present the first measurement on their prevalence and severity in the wild.
2022-06-08, Genoa
Our work "Hand Sanitizers in the Wild: A Large-scale Study of Custom JavaScript Sanitizer Functions" was presented by David Klein at EuroS&P 2022 in Genoa, Italy.
Input sanitization is the main technique to defend against injection attacks such as Client-Side Cross-Site Scripting. With more and more functionality being offered in the form of web applications, the importance of correct sanitizing functions increases as well.
In our work we performed a comprehensive study about JavaScript sanitizing functions, deployed on the web at large. We found that a large portion of sanitizers are either insecure or lack generality.
2022-06-02, Nagasaki
Our work "Server-Side Browsers: Exploring the Web’s Hidden Attack Surface" was presented by Marius Musch and Robin Kirchner at AsiaCCS 2022 in Nagasaki.
When websites have use-cases like displaying previews or screenshots of other websites, maintainers tend to shift from simple tools like curl to fully-fledged automated browsers, like Puppeteer, to match the ever-growing complexity of the modern Web. However, visiting arbitrary, user-controlled URLs with these browsers diligently requires them to be kept up-to-date.
In our work, we investigated the phenomenon of server-side browsers at scale. We found that many websites run severely outdated browsers on the server-side, most of them not updated for more than six months, vulnerable to publicly available proof-of-concept exploits.