Press / Media

Fraunhofer SIT is now offering its cyber training courses on the ATHENE Cyber Range at its new site in Heilbronn. At the Fraunhofer Heilbronn Research and Innovation Centre (HNFIZ) for Cybersecurity, companies and public authorities can now learn, in a simulated environment, how to detect and repel cyber attacks at an early stage.

The National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwer­ionen­forschung are launching a cooperation in the fields of scientific data processing and cybersecurity. The aim of the collaboration is to set up and use high-performance infrastructures for research projects and to improve the security of data center technologies. ATHENE will install high-performance AI computers in GSI’s data center “Green IT Cube” and operate them together with GSI as a living laboratory. The powerful AI research facility can be used to analyze large amounts of data with the help of complex AI models without external parties gaining access to information. Researchers can also analyze highly sensitive data or simulate AI attacks.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft will expand its activities in Heilbronn significantly with funding from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation. From 2025, a total of eight research and innovation centers will address research topics ranging from cybersecurity to quantum AI. This will provide an important impetus for innovation in Germany and strengthen the country’s competitiveness in these fields.

The National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE has uncovered a critical flaw in the design of DNSSEC, the Security Extensions of DNS (Domain Name System). DNS is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. The design flaw has devastating consequences for essentially all DNSSEC-validating DNS implementations and public DNS providers, such as Google and Cloudflare. The ATHENE team, led by Prof. Dr. Haya Schulmann from Goethe University Frankfurt, developed “KeyTrap”, a new class of attacks: with just a single DNS packet hackers could stall all widely used DNS implementations and public DNS providers. Exploitation of this attack would have severe consequences for any application using the Internet including unavailability of technologies such as web-browsing, e-mail, and instant messaging. With KeyTrap, an attacker could completely disable large parts of the worldwide Internet. The researchers worked with all relevant vendors and major public DNS providers over several months, resulting in a number of vendor-specific patches, the last ones published on Tuesday, February 13. It is highly recommended for all providers of DNS services to apply these patches immediately to mitigate this critical vulnerability.

The National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity, ATHENE, and the European Space Agency, ESA, are jointly launching an international hacking contest for students. Themed "PWN the Rover", teams of participants must first complete a series of hacking challenges. The eight teams that qualify in this preliminary round will then be allowed to compete in the finals at the ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt on 17 October 2023 and put their hacking skills to the test on ESA’s ExoMy 3D printed rovers. The winning team will receive attractive prizes such as Hak5 USB Rubber Duckies, participation in a practical training simulation by ESA (Ladybird Guide to Mission Operations Training) for the support of a real space mission and security training at the Fraunhofer Cyber Range, where IT teams train for the severity of a cyberattack. For more information, visit www.pwn-the-rover.space.

In the fight against money laundering, established software-based detection methods work imprecisely and often raise false alarms. Consequently, investigating authorities are frequently overburdened because they must follow up on every suspicion. In the new research project MaLeFiz (Machine Learning for the Identification of Conspicuous Financial Transactions), researchers are now working on a solution that uses machine learning – an artificial intelligence technique – to improve the search for illegal money flows and make it more precise so that fewer false alarms are generated. In addition, the project partners are developing minimum requirements and control mechanisms for AI solutions used in the financial industry. Furthermore, the results of the AI are to be made traceable. Project partners are Deloitte GmbH, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the University of Leipzig as well as the Center for Technology and Society at TU Berlin. The MaLeFiz project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and will run for three years. Fraunhofer SIT is leading the project and is responsible for the development of the AI-based tool. For more information, visit www.sit.fraunhofer.de/en/malefiz.

Counterfeits of high-quality products such as medicines, cosmetics, watches, or food and beverages circulate in large numbers, especially in online retail. Consumers barely have a chance to verify the authenticity of a product. In the SmartID project, scientists at Fraunhofer are now developing a counterfeit-proof barcode system for authenticity verification simply by using a smartphone without accessing a database. The team is presenting a SmartID demonstrator for the first time at the Interpack 2023 trade fair for packaging in Düsseldorf.

Protecting the cybersecurity of society, business and the state, and fending off threats: That is the goal of ATHENE, the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity. Through its research and development, Goethe University now is contributing to Europe's largest cybersecurity research center.