Benjamin Fabian

Benjamin Fabian
Technische Hochschule Wildau | TH Wildau · Informatics in Public Administration

Prof. Dr. habil.

About

167
Publications
179,205
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,728
Citations
Introduction
Hi! I am scientific director of EDIH pro_digital; professor of E-Government, IT Security and IT Management at TH Wildau; assoc. researcher at HU Berlin (IS) and Weizenbaum Institute. My research interests include: Information Security, Privacy & Ethics (across disciplines). AI, Machine Learning, Data Science. Large-Scale Systems (Internet, Cloud, P2P, Blockchain, IoT, Critical Infrastructures, Smart Cities). Network Science & Applied Graph Theory. Classical Greek Philology. Thanks :)
Additional affiliations
April 2021 - present
Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society
Position
  • Associated Researcher
April 2016 - March 2021
Hochschule für Telekommunikation Leipzig
Position
  • Professor
Description
  • Professor of Business Intelligence and Data Science
October 2014 - present
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Position
  • Senior Researcher and Lecturer
Education
October 1990 - May 2000
Freie Universität Berlin
Field of study
  • Mathematics

Publications

Publications (167)
Article
This paper presents a conceptual framework for security engineering, with a strong focus on security requirements elicitation and analysis. This conceptual framework establishes a clear-cut vocabulary and makes explicit the interrelations between the different concepts and notions used in security engineering. Further, we apply our conceptual frame...
Article
Full-text available
In healthcare, inter-organizational sharing and collaborative use of big data become increasingly important. The cloud computing paradigm is expected to provide an environment perfectly matching the needs of collaborating healthcare workers. However, there are still many security and privacy challenges impeding the wide adoption of cloud computing...
Article
Full-text available
Research on the robustness of networks, and in particular the Internet, has gained critical importance in recent decades because more and more individuals, societies and firms rely on this global network infrastructure for communication, knowledge transfer, business processes and e-commerce. In particular, modeling the structure of the Internet has...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Machine learning models are increasingly used in critical decision-making applications. However, these models are susceptible to replicating or even amplifying bias present in real-world data. While there are various bias mitigation methods and base estimators in the literature, selecting the optimal model for a specific application remains challen...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its contribution to the advancement of human society, the prioritization of ethical principles from the viewpoint of its users has not yet received much attention and empirical investigations. This is important to develop appropriate safeguards and increase the acceptance of AI-mediated techn...
Article
Full-text available
In recent decades, artificial intelligence has undergone transformative advancements, reshaping diverse sectors such as healthcare, transport, agriculture, energy, and the media. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI’s potential, concerns persist about its potential negative impacts, including substantial energy consumption and ethical challenges....
Preprint
Full-text available
In recent decades, artificial intelligence has undergone transformative advancements, reshaping diverse sectors such as healthcare, transport, agriculture, energy, and the media. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI’s potential, concerns persist about its potential negative impacts, including substantial energy consumption and ethical challenges....
Article
Full-text available
Privacy policies are the main method for informing Internet users of how their data are collected and shared. This study aims to analyze the deficiencies of privacy policies in terms of readability, vague statements, and the use of pacifying phrases concerning privacy. This represents the undertaking of a step forward in the literature on this topi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Dieser Beitrag bietet eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme des Predictive Policing am Beispiel der Dimension Raum. Unter Berücksichtigung der aktuellen Entwicklungen des europäischen AI-Acts werden Maßnahmen und Methoden beleuchtet und aus ethischer Perspektive reflektiert und diskutiert. Das methodische Fundament bildet eine systematische Literaturanal...
Article
Full-text available
By establishing an infrastructure for monitoring and blocking networks in accordance with European Union (EU) law on preventive measures against the spread of information, EU member states have also made it easier to block websites and services and monitor information. While relevant studies have documented Internet censorship in non‐European count...
Article
Full-text available
Empirical insights into promising commercial sentiment analysis solutions that go beyond the claims of their vendors are rare. Moreover, due to the constant evolution in the field, previous studies are far from reflecting the current situation. The goal of this article is to evaluate and compare current solutions using two experimental studies. In...
Article
Full-text available
Most research on fairness in Machine Learning assumes the relationship between fairness and accuracy to be a trade-off, with an increase in fairness leading to an unavoidable loss of accuracy. In this study, several approaches for fair Machine Learning are studied to experimentally analyze the relationship between accuracy and group fairness. The r...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In recent years, artificial intelligence has essentially contributed to the progress of human society in various application areas. However, it also gave raise to questioning its ethical principles in application domains such as autonomous driving. Despite a plethora of research related to acceptance of autonomously driving vehicles in the MIS rese...
Article
Full-text available
Security threats have increased in recent years. To motivate the developers to stick to the security policies, the notion of usable security is investigated. Enhancing the usability of security services leads to developing software products that are resilient against security threats. In this paper, we investigate the role of usable security in dev...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Motivated by their increasing popularity and usefulness in the English-speaking world, we model and analyze patient referral networks for medical specialties based on Germany-wide claims data from the fourth quarter of 2015. Based on the average values of local graph measures, different groups of medical specialties could be distinguished. Family p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Autonomous systems (AS) that relay Internet traffic are not equally well connected. The failure of just a tiny portion of them can render multiple sites inaccessible and disconnect multiple service providers from the global network, while targeted attacks can severely impact Internet connectivity. Modeling Internet topology and measuring Internet c...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important in many industries due to its diverse areas of application and potential. In logistics in particular, increasing customer demands and the growth in shipment volumes are leading to difficulties in forecasting delivery times, especially for the last mile. This paper explores the potentia...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Empirical insights into high-promising commercial sentiment analysis solutions that go beyond their vendors’ claims are rare. Moreover, due to ongoing advances in the field, earlier studies are far from reflecting the current situation due to the constant evolution of the field. The present research aims to evaluate and compare current solutions. B...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
European Union (EU) member states consider themselves bulwarks of democracy and freedom of speech. However, there is a lack of empirical studies assessing possible violations of these principles in the EU through Internet censorship. This work starts addressing this research gap by investigating Internet censorship in Spain over 2016-2020, includin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research on the robustness of the Internet has gained critical importance in the last decades because more and more individuals, societies and firms rely on this global network infrastructure for communication, knowledge transfer, business processes and e-commerce. In particular, modeling the structure of Internet has inspired several novel graph m...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Despite substantial investments, data science has failed to deliver significant business value in many companies. So far, the reasons for this problem have not been explored systematically. This study tries to find possible explanations for this shortcoming and analyses the specific challenges in data-driven projects. To identify the reasons that m...
Article
Full-text available
E-mail tracking provides companies with fine-grained behavioral data about e-mail recipients, which can be a threat for individual privacy and enterprise security. This problem is especially severe since e-mail tracking techniques often gather data without the informed consent of the recipients. So far e-mail recipients lack a reliable protection m...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In diesem Beitrag wird die Architektur eines Systems zum Sammeln diverser Luftqualitätsdaten aus unterschiedlichen Quellen beschrieben. Aufbauend darauf werden anhand eines konkreten Beispiels verschiedene Verfahren zur Vorhersage von Feinstaubkonzentrationen in urbanen Gebieten unter Berücksichtigung mehrerer Kriterien wie Vorhersagegenauigkeit un...
Article
Victims of child sexual abuse suffer from physical, psychological, and emotional trauma. The detection and deletion of illicit online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) helps in reducing and even stopping the continuous re-victimization of children. Furthermore, automatic detection may also support legal authorities to search for and review the mas...
Article
Full-text available
Cloud computing promises essential improvements in healthcare delivery performance. However, its wide adoption in healthcare is yet to be seen, one main reason being patients’ concerns for security and privacy of their sensitive medical records. These concerns can be addressed through corresponding security and privacy requirements within the syste...
Book
The “HPI Future SOC Lab” is a cooperation of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and industry partners. Its mission is to enable and promote exchange and interaction between the research community and the industry partners. The HPI Future SOC Lab provides researchers with free of charge access to a complete infrastructure of state of the art hard an...
Article
Full-text available
Internet censorship is a an important field of research with implications for society, politics and business. However, little focus has been spent on cross-country comparisons of online content control. This article aims at reducing this research gap by performing a comparative literature review of Internet censorship practices in France, Turkey an...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, the increase of cyber threats has raised many concerns about security and privacy in the digital world. However, new attack methods are often limited to a few core techniques. In this paper, in order to detect new threat patterns, we use an attack graph structure to model unprecedented network traffic. This graph for the unknown at...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Ethics for artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic of growing practical relevance. Many people seem to believe that AI could render jobs obsolete in the future. Others wonder who is in charge for the actions of AI systems they encounter. Providing and prioritizing ethical guidelines for AI is therefore an important measure for providing safeguards...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The goal of this paper is to investigate the availability of mobile apps in different countries. Our research on the availability of apps in three major app stores finds that users in specific countries do not have access to popular app stores due to local laws not allowing the operation of such online applications, financial reasons, or because th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper studies the availability of apps and app stores across countries. Our research finds that users in specific countries do not have access to popular app stores due to local laws, financial reasons, or because countries are on a sanctions list that prohibit foreign businesses to operate within its jurisdiction. Furthermore, this paper pres...
Article
Full-text available
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the problem of fake news on social media gained renewed public attention. Consequently, a huge amount of research literature concerning this matter is published each year. With this study, we seek to identify and integrate the findings of relevant and high quality studies across several research discipline...
Article
Full-text available
Against the importance of online privacy, this paper investigates German tourism websites previously shown as actively adopting mail tracking technology. For a sample of 50 highly visited websites, we analyse the quantity and type of data both mandatory and optional for registration. We further examine the extent to which personal data is collected...
Chapter
Full-text available
Social Media Daten im Spannungsfeld der digitalen und raumbezogenen Epidemiologie, Verfahren zur automatisierten Extraktion von Nutzerinformationen, Potenzial der digitalen Epidemiologie für die Versorgungsforschung, Potenzial der digital räumlichen Epidemiologie für die Versorgungsforschung, Potenzial digitaler Informationen für die Gesundheitserh...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important development in the context of business information systems. The IoT, as a foundation for cyber-physical information systems, has similar potential for revolutionizing business as cloud computing over the last decade. The purpose of the current article is to formulate and apply a framework in order to tak...
Article
Full-text available
Internet connectivity of cloud services is of exceptional importance for both their providers and consumers. This article demonstrates the outlines of a method for measuring cloud-service connectivity at the Internet Protocol level from a client’s perspective. For this, we actively collect connectivity data via traceroute measurements from PlanetLa...
Article
Full-text available
The Internet has developed into a communication infrastructure of critical importance for global society and business. In this study, we analyze the impact of systematically attacking border routers and the resulting effects on global Internet connectivity at the autonomous-system level. For this, we simulate several malware-propagation strategies...
Article
Full-text available
The evolution of Internet has radically changed the way millions of people conduct their financial affairs today. Online payment solutions and online banking services attract more and more customers every day, whereas Internet connectivity is essential for their availability. This study models the Internet structure in the context of known online f...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
E-Mail tracking mechanisms gather information on individual recipients’ reading behavior. Previous studies show that e-mail newsletters commonly include tracking elements. However, prior work does not examine the degree to which e-mail senders actually employ gathered user information. The paper closes this research gap by means of an experimental...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: Decentralized, blockchain-based equity crowdfunding has potential to close the equity-funding gap faced by startups. The present paper investigates the driving forces of equity crowdfunding and the impact of the blockchain. Design: In a two-round, expert-based Delphi survey, ten market-driving forces within equity crowdfunding are identifi...
Article
Full-text available
Investigating the correlations between graph metrics in various networks is a prosperous research topic that only starts to evolve. Knowledge about graph metrics interrelations may be beneficial in many other aspects of networks studying, starting from optimizing computations to even detecting particular network types by looking at their correlatio...
Article
Full-text available
The Internet is an important global critical infrastructure. Yet, it has remained unclear how it is organized in different regions and areas of political influence. This explorative study analyses geographic aspects of the Autonomous System networks in different countries. By using Internet geolocation information for locating autonomous systems, w...
Article
Email tracking allows email senders to collect fine-grained behavior and location data on email recipients, who are uniquely identifiable via their email address. Such tracking invades user privacy in that email tracking techniques gather data without user consent or awareness. Striving to increase privacy in email communication, this paper develop...
Article
Full-text available
Bitcoin is a digital monetary system that functions without any central authority and pre-assumed identities among participants. Contrary to a popular belief, Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous or secure. In this article, we survey security and privacy risks in Bitcoin and related countermeasures. We also examine self-reported and actual adoption...
Article
Full-text available
While information technology has been advancing rapidly during the past years, the dawn of the information age has not only elevated the importance of privacy in theory and practice but also raised concerns about how to protect a users' private information. Within the information systems literature, there exist multiple approaches for studying onli...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Based on BGP and traceroute data integrated from global-scale mapping projects, we analyze the Internet graph with respect to connectivity and robustness. In an evolution of the initial project, we assess several malware strategies that could affect border routers and their corresponding Autonomous Systems. In this project phase, we consolidated ea...
Data
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important development in the context of business information systems. The IoT, as a foundation for cyber-physical information systems, has similar potential for revolutionizing business as cloud computing over the last decade. The purpose of the current article is to formulate and apply a framework in order to tak...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Web tracking seems to become ubiquitous in online business and leads to increased privacy concerns of users. This paper provides an overview over the current state of the art of web-tracking research, aiming to reveal the relevance and methodologies of this research area and create a foundation for future work. In particular, this study addresses t...
Article
Full-text available
Anonymous communication systems (ACS) offer privacy and anonymity through the Internet. They are mostly free tools and are popular among users all over the world. In the recent years, anonymity applications faced many problems regarding traffic engineering methods. Even though they ensure privacy under some conditions, their anonymity will be endan...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents the initial findings of an open and collective effort towards a cross comparison study of web-content blocking regulations and practices, in different parts of Cyprus. Our analysis is based on network measurement data collected by volunteers in Cyprus, using a custom OONI probe and open DNS resolvers, from five residential ISPs;...
Working Paper
Full-text available
Purpose: Despite intensive research during the last two decades, the detailed structural composition of the Internet is still opaque to researchers. Nevertheless, due to the importance of Internet maps for the development of more effective routing algorithms, security mechanisms, and resilience management, more detailed insights are required. This...
Article
Full-text available
Using graph structures one can model various types of problems. The Internet is one of them. CORIA is a multipurpose framework to analyse connectivity risks of graph structured data which was designed using Internet topology data. We augment the existing framework for graph analysis CORIA with the objective to increase scalability and broaden the f...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online privacy policies notify users of a Website how their personal information is collected, processed and stored. Against the background of rising privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to represent an influential instrument for increasing customer trust and loyalty. However, in practice, consumers seem to actually read privacy policies only in...
Article
Full-text available
The Bitcoin digital currency increasingly attracts an essential number of Internet users. This study focuses on the future outlook of Bitcoin by identifying drivers and impediments of the currency's adoption. For this aim, we conduct an empirical survey of around one hundred Bitcoin experts and discuss the results. Our research contributes to the p...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores the feasibility of utilizing pure public good characteristics in a business peer-to-peer network by designing and developing a prototype for a centralized service that implements the Clarke-Groves mechanism for sharing operational costs.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Internet can be considered as the most important infrastructure for modern society and businesses. A loss of Internet connectivity has strong negative financial impacts for businesses and economies. Therefore, assessing Internet connectivity, in particular beyond their own premises and area of direct control, is of growing importance in the fac...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Based on our traceroute data integrated from global-scale mapping projects aimed to generate comprehensive Internet maps at different abstraction levels, we analyze the Internet graph in terms of important nodes. In an evolution of the initial project, we start to assess several malware strategies that could affect border routers. We present some p...
Article
Full-text available
In the digital age, the careful handling of personal data plays an important role, since privacy is vital for users. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for users that data collection is minimized and their data is treated strictly confidential. This paper analyzes the data a user needs to provide for an E-Commerce website. Specifically, our case...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Anonymous communication systems (ACS) offer privacy and anonymity through the Internet. They are mostly free tools and are popular among users all over the world. In the recent years, anonymity applications faced many problems regarding traffic engineering methods. Even though they ensure privacy under some conditions, their anonymity will be endan...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
E-mail advertisement, as one instrument in the marketing mix, allows companies to collect fine-grained behavioural data about individual users’ e-mail reading habits realised through sophisticated tracking mechanisms. Such tracking can be harmful for user privacy and security. This problem is especially severe since e-mail tracking techniques gathe...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This article analyzes how users perceive the degree of anonymity provided by the Bitcoin network, to what extent they are concerned about anonymity when using Bitcoin, whether they are knowledgeable of and concerned about specific de-anonymization attacks, and if they are aware of and adopt privacy-preserving countermeasures. A user survey with 125...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Based on our integrated traceroute data from global-scale mapping projects to generate comprehensive Internet maps at different abstraction levels, we (a) conducted the main graph analyses with respect to identifying important nodes. In an evolution of the project, we (b) started to assess several malware strategies that could affect border routers...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns. Objectives: This study examines the effect of confidentiality assurance in a cloud-computing environment on...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a new approach to network traffic control based on the pattern theorem. In order to generate unique detection patterns for the process of traffic analysis, a self-avoiding walk algorithm is used. During data processing and analysis, the traffic patterns are adapted dynamically in real-time. The modified traffic patterns are syst...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper examines the Twitter social graph of German politicians and political parties during a time period not potentially biased by nearby elections. Based on a data set of 1,719 politicians across the entire political spectrum of this important country in the EU, two graphs are constructed, which also reflect relationships within and between p...