Press / Media

The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT presents a new solution for protection against document forgery at itsa fair in Nuremberg. The digitized world offers plenty of opportunities for fraud, and every year German companies incur huge losses as a result. With the new DocSeal solution of Fraunhofer SIT, companies and public authorities can quickly and easily provide digital documents and paper documents with forgery protection. For this purpose, a colorful barcode (JAB code) is printed on the document, which records important document contents and their placement in the document in a tamper-proof manner. An app can then be used to check document authenticity and automatically detect tampering. To use DocSeal, one does not need Internet access or a central database. All the necessary information is stored directly in the colorful barcode. The barcode technology is ISO-standardized and open source. The solution was developed within ATHENE research center. For more information, visit www.sit.fraunhofer.de/docseal.

The National research center for Cybersecurity ATHENE has found a way to break one of the basic mechanisms used to secure Internet traffic. The mechanism, called RPKI, is actually designed to prevent cybercriminals or government attackers from diverting traffic on the Internet. Such redirections are surprisingly common on the Internet, e.g., for espionage or through misconfigurations. The ATHENE scientist team of Prof. Dr. Haya Shulman showed that attackers can completely bypass the security mechanism without the affected network operators being able to detect this. According to analyses by the ATHENE team, popular implementations of RPKI worldwide were vulnerable by early 2021. The team informed the manufacturers, and now presented the findings to the international expert public.

The world's largest automotive market, China, is experiencing high growth rates for electric cars. In order to successfully compete in China, international automakers must comply with Chinese cybersecurity, cryptography and data security regulations. Fraunhofer SIT and Fraunhofer Singapore have summarized these in a joint study: It contains an overview of laws and regulations, including the responsible institutions in China, since 2015. The study also addresses research and development facilities as well as standardization authorities. The study is available for download free of charge at www.sit.fraunhofer.de/NEVChinaSurvey.

Counterfeit-proof product protection and resilient supply chains are the goals of the Fraunhofer SmartID project. The Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP, for Secure Information Technology SIT and for Open Communication Systems FOKUS are developing a novel marking system that can determine the authenticity of products via smart devices even while being offline, i.e. without access to a database. SmartID will be embedded in existing track & trace infrastructures and can be printed on products or their packaging using commercially available printing processes.

The winners of the first Fraunhofer CyberStar Award (FCSA) were announced today: They are Eyal Ronen, Ph.D., from the Tel Aviv University and Anatoly Shusterman from the Ben-Gurion University. The Fraunhofer CyberStar Award promotes excellent graduates in applied cybersecurity and their thesis. The award ceremony took place as part of the first German-Israeli Cyber Conference and was held online. It was supported by high-level speakers from both Israel and Germany such as Yigal Unna, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Arne Schönbohm, the President of Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security, and other well-known cybersecurity experts. The conference was opened by Susanne Wasum-Rainer, the German Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and Jeremy Nissim Issacharoff, the Israeli Ambassador in Berlin. The conference was chaired by Haya Shulman.

A homemade directional antenna made of potato chip cans and two commercially available mini-computers are enough to hack Bluetooth locks made by the US manufacturer Tapplock in seconds, as proven by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt. The manufacturer was informed about the vulnerabilities and has since fixed them in one of its models.