Christian Reuter

Technical University of Darmstadt | TU · Department of Computer Science (Dept.20)

This work presents a mapping tool designed to visualize potential risk factors affecting the lifelines of inter-continental communication-subsea data cables. While various geographic information systems provide public data on the oceans, including browser-based maps showcasing maritime fixed infrastructure, these services vary widely in terms of da...

This article examines how Colombian NGOs use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for peacebuilding attempts amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 17 interviews with NGO members, the study underscores the pivotal role of digital peacebuilding in sustaining and expanding peace attempts, effective data management, and a broader engage...

Advances in science and technology play a crucial role in the context of peace, conflict and security. However, research on the intersection of peace and conflict research as well as computer science is not well established yet. As information technology (IT) becomes ubiquitous, this encompasses both the resilience of IT infrastructures, e.g. as ta...

As cyber weapons and artificial intelligence technologies share the same technological foundation of bits and bytes, there is a strong trend of connecting both, thus addressing the imminent challenge of cyber weapons of processing, filtering and aggregating huge amounts of digital data in real time into decisions and actions. This chapter (This cha...

The encompassing trend of digitalisation and widespread dependencies on IT systems also triggers adjustments in the military forces. Besides necessary enhancements of IT security and defensive measures for cyberspace, a growing number of states are establishing offensive military capabilities for this domain. The chapter discusses historical develo...

Not only today, but also in the future, information technology and advances in the field of computer science will have a high relevance for peace and security. Of course, a textbook like this can only cover a selective part of research and a certain point in time. Nonetheless, it can be attempted to identify trends, challenges and offer an outlook...

Verification is one of the pillars of arms control and non-proliferation treaties, as well as an important part of Confidence Building Measures. It defines practical measures that enable treaty members to check treaty compliance by observing, counting or monitoring specific actions and their accordance with the agreed rules. In contrast to historic...

Arms control aims at preventing conflicts and fostering stability in inter-state relations by either reducing the probability of usage of a specific weapon or regulating its use and thus, reducing the costs of armament. Several approaches to arms control exist, limiting or reducing numbers of weapons and armed forces, disarmament (“down to zero”) o...

Over the last decade, socio-technological innovations such as mobile technologies and social media services have strongly impacted modern culture and political processes. They are widely established in everyday life, but also relevant during natural and human-made crises and conflicts. For instance, Facebook was part of the 2010 so-called Arab Spri...

Technological and scientific progress, especially the rapid development in information technology (IT), plays a crucial role regarding questions of peace and security. This textbook addresses the significance, potential, and challenges of IT for peace and security. For this purpose, the book offers an introduction to peace, conflict, and security r...

Critical infrastructures (CI) provide societies with essential goods and services. With the growing impact of digitalisation, information and communication technologies play an increasing role within these entities. Large-scale outages in many of the ten German CI sectors revealed the increasing vulnerabilities stemming from dependencies on electri...

Conflicts in cyberspace do not longer constitute a fictional scenario of the future. To gain a better understanding of how such conflicts are carried out, interdisciplinary research and teaching building on both computer science and peace and security studies is indispensable. Even though numerous established courses and textbooks exist in some dis...

Dual-use of IT is relevant to many applications and technology areas: how can we prevent, control or manage the risk of misuse of IT? How can dual-use awareness and regulation help to mitigate the risks to peace and security on the national and international levels? As cyberspace has been declared a military domain, IT is increasingly important for...

In many scenarios, users have to communicate sensitive data with third parties such as doctors, lawyers, insurance companies, social workers, or online shops. Handing over personal data is necessary to use those services, but delegating tasks to increase efficiency still poses the risk that personal data might be leaked. To minimize this risk and f...

In many applications and websites people use in their everyday life, their privacy and data are threatened, e.g., by script tracking during browsing. Although researchers and companies have developed privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), they are often difficult to use for lay users. In this paper, we conducted a literature review to classify user...

Misinformation is one of the key challenges facing society today. User-centered misinformation interventions as digital countermeasures that exert a direct influence on users represent a promising means to deal with the large amounts of information available. While an extensive body of research on this topic exists, researchers are confronted with...

Active learning is designed to minimize annotation efforts by prioritizing instances that most enhance learning. However, many active learning strategies struggle with a 'cold start' problem, needing substantial initial data to be effective. This limitation often reduces their utility for pre-trained models, which already perform well in few-shot s...

In disasters and crises, crisis preparation at the household level is crucial for societal resilience. However, motivating citizens to take personal responsibility and to implement preparedness measures remains challenging. This study investigates the impact of values, beliefs and norms on preparedness. Through a survey in Germany on resource-orien...

Misinformation presents a challenge to democracies, particularly in times of crisis. One way in which misinformation is spread is through voice messages sent via messenger groups, which enable members to share information on a larger scale. Gaining user perspectives on digital misinformation interventions as countermeasure after detection is crucia...

The field of cybersecurity is evolving fast. Security professionals are in need of intelligence on past, current and - ideally - on upcoming threats, because attacks are becoming more advanced and are increasingly targeting larger and more complex systems. Since the processing and analysis of such large amounts of information cannot be addressed ma...

Mobile Erhebung semantisch modellierter Daten und deren Auswertung im Feld durch Hybrid Cloud Computing sind Grundlage des Resilienten Smart Farmings im Projekt GeoBox. Eine skalierbare Architektur und semantische Datenmodellierung ermˆglichen das Management betrieblicher Software-Container, die flexible Anpassung an neue Aufgaben und die Realisier...

Browser cookies, especially those from third parties, pose a threat to individual privacy. While it is possible in principle to control the number of cookies accepted, this choice is often neither usable nor truly informed. To address this issue, this study used semi-structured interviews (N=19) to identify attitudes and user requirements to develo...

In today’s world, cyber-attacks are becoming more frequent and thus proactive protection against them is becoming more important. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is a possible solution, as it collects threat information in various information sources and derives stakeholder intelligence to protect one’s infrastructure. The current focus of CTI in r...

1 Introduction and Brief History 2 Usage Patterns – Types of Interaction in Social Media 2.1 Citizens to Citizens (C2C) – Self-Coordination and Help 2.2 Authorities to Citizens (A2C) – Crisis Communication and Public Alerting 2.3 Citizens to Authorities (C2A) – Integration of Citizen-Generated Content 2.4 Authorities to Authorities (A2A) – Inter- a...

Like past crises, the COVID-19 pandemic has galvanized individual volunteers to contribute to the public response. This includes digital volunteers who have organized physical aid and conducted social media activities. Analyzing German volunteering support groups on Facebook and related Reddit threads in the context of COVID-19, we show what types...

Neben positiven Aspekten wie der Produktivitätssteigerung bringt die Digitalisierung auch neue Gefahren mit sich. Entsprechend muss der Prozess gerade in Bereichen von gesellschaftlich enormer Bedeutung kritisch begleitet werden, um eine fundierte Entscheidung bei Auswahl und Entwicklung neuer Technologien zu treffen. Die Vision ist hierbei ein res...

The militarization of cyberspace has been a topic in international fora and scientific debates for several years. However, the development of applicable, and verifiable arms control measures that can effectively reduce the risk of military escalations in cyberspace is still hindered by the characteristics of this domain. The article analyses challe...

The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potent...

Cyberspace is a fragile construct threatened by malicious cyber operations of different actors, with vulnerabilities in IT hardware and software forming the basis for such activities, thus also posing a threat to global IT security. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence accelerate this development, either with artificial intelligence...

Cyberspace is a fragile construct threatened by malicious cyber operations of different actors, with vulnerabilities in IT hardware and software forming the basis for such activities, thus also posing a threat to global IT security. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence accelerate this development, either with artificial intelligence...

The importance of dealing with fake news has increased in both political and social contexts: While existing studies mainly focus on how to detect and label fake news, approaches to help users make their own assessments are largely lacking. This article presents existing black-box and white-box approaches and compares advantages and disadvantages....

While cyberspace has evolved into a commonly shared space vital to our individual lives and societies, malicious cyber activities by state actors as part of espionage operations, regarding defense strategies, or as part of traditional conflicts have strongly increased. In contrast, attributing the origin of such activities remains problematic. The...

Publicly available information contains valuable information for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). This can be used to prevent attacks that have already taken place on other systems. Ideally, only the initial attack succeeds and all subsequent ones are detected and stopped. But while there are different standards to exchange this information, a lot...

The negotiation of stakeholder values as a collaborative process throughout technology development has been studied extensively within the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction. Despite their increasing significance for cybersecurity incident response, there is a gap in research on values of importance to the...

Zusammenfassung Der Überfall Russlands auf die Ukraine und der sich anschließende Krieg haben neben vielen anderen sicherheitspolitischen Gewissheiten auch zum ersten Mal die Rolle des Cyberspace in einem offenen Angriffskrieg demonstriert und bedenkenswerte Entwicklungen offenbart. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, die militärischen Aktivitäten im Cybe...

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) are an important core component of modern farming companies as they allow, e.g. to document activities, create fertilisation plans, and feed digital equipment with required data. Since the entire agricultural sector is an essential component of food production, high standards of resilience should be establ...

When considering privacy, context, and environmental circumstances can have a strong influence on individual decisions and user behavior. Especially in crises or threatening situations, privacy may conflict with other values, such as personal safety and health. In other cases, personal or public safety can also be dependent on privacy: the context...

Landwirtschaft als essenzieller Teil der Nahrungsmittelproduktion gehört zu den kritischen Infrastrukturen (KRITIS). Dementsprechend müssen die eingesetzten Systeme für einen widerstandsfähigen Betrieb ausgelegt sein. Dies gilt auch für die auf landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben eingesetzte Software, die Sicherheits- und Resilienzkriterien genügen muss...

The article examines which technical aspects of autonomous driving are potentially transferable to the military sector. Through expert interviews the strong fragmentation of technologies in the field of autonomous driving becomes apparent. This hinders the clear identification of a specific dual-use technology. Environmental perception, artificial...

Misinformation represent a key challenge for society. User-centered misinformation interventions as digital countermeasures that exert a direct influence on users represent a promising means to deal with the large amounts of information available. While an extensive body of research on this topic exists, researchers are confronted with a diverse re...

Given the lack of empirical examples of how research can be conducted via digital means in sensitive contexts, this paper provides a threat model using Afghanistan, where the Taliban took power in August 2021, as an example. Both technical and non-technical research-related risks are analyzed, paying attention to research ethics, data security, and...

The use of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to monitor and detect cybersecurity threats is gaining popularity among Cybersecurity Emergency or Incident Response Teams (CERTs/CSIRTs). They increasingly use semi-automated OSINT approaches when monitoring cyber threats for public infrastructure services and incident response. Most of the systems use p...

The field of cybersecurity is evolving fast. Experts need to be informed about past, current and - in the best case - upcoming threats, because attacks are becoming more advanced, targets bigger and systems more complex. As this cannot be addressed manually, cybersecurity experts need to rely on machine learning techniques. In the texutual domain,...

Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organisation of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the ways in which individual platforms ar...

Social media in crisis management has become an important research topic. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the use of social media in emergency and crisis situations has greatly increased. Particularly in the period from 2007 until today, many studies have concentrated on the use of ICT and social media before, during, or after numerous emergen...

Finding a way to ensure an effective use of social media has become increasingly important to emergency services over the past decade. Various studies show that social media is used in emergencies—and that in spite of possible challenges for emergency services, beneficial use cases can be identified. However, relatively little empirical data is ava...

In 2001, the first case of social media being used for disaster relief was recorded. Since then, social media and its usage for public safety and security—before, during, and after crises, emergencies, or disasters—has been developing continuously and becoming more and more pervasive. As a reaction to this, many studies in the field of crisis infor...

Social media is increasingly being used during emergencies. Most available studies focus on how citizens and/or authorities use social media during specific events. However, larger quantitative studies with significant results on citizens’ attitudes, needs, and future plans in such events are not available—especially such of a comparative nature re...

The amount of available data is rapidly increasing. Based on the technological advances with mobile and ubiquitous computing, the use of social media is increasingly becoming a normal part of daily life and extraordinary situations, such as crises. Not surprisingly, this increasing use is one reason why data on the internet is also developing so qu...

Over the past few decades, the number and variety of cyberattacks and malware patterns have increased immensely. As a countermeasure, computer emergency response teams were established with the responsibility of securing the cyber environment. However, recent studies revealed that currently performed manual processes and the unavailability of adequ...

The constantly increasing number of threats and the existing diversity of information sources pose challenges for Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs). In order to respond to new threats, CERTs need to gather information in a timely and comprehensive manner. However, the volume of information and sources can lead to information overload. This...

In crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to support users when dealing with social media content. Considering digital resilience, we propose a web app based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) to provide an overview of potentially misleading vs. non-misleading content on Twitter, which can be explored by users and enable foundational lea...

As cyber weapons and artificial intelligence technologies share the same technological foundation of bits and bytes, there is a strong trend of connecting both, thus addressing the imminent challenge of cyber weapons of processing, filtering and aggregating huge amounts of digital data in real time into decisions and actions. This chapter will anal...

The number of newly published vulnerabilities is constantly increasing. Until now, the information available when a new vulnerability is published is manually assessed by experts using a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) vector and score. This assessment is time consuming and requires expertise. Various works already try to predict CVSS ve...

Concise instruments to determine privacy personas – typical privacy-related user groups – are not available at present. Consequently, we aimed to identify them on a privacy knowledge–privacy behavior ratio based on a self-developed instrument. To achieve this, we conducted an item analysis (N = 820) and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N = 656...

Das Resilient Smart Farming Lab (RSFLab) beschäftigt sich mit digitalen Technologien und Anwendungen die einen Beitrag zur Resilienz landwirtschaftlicher Prozesse liefern. Dabei werden Themen wie der Einsatz von Sensoren in der Landwirtschaft fokussiert (z.B. LoRa-Sensortechnologien, NIR-Sensortechnologien) und deren Nutzen für die landwirtschaftli...

Zusammenfassung Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Lehre zwischen Informatik sowie Friedens- und Sicherheitsforschung ist vor dem Hintergrund der Bedeutung möglicher Konflikte im Cyberspace unabdingbar. Auch wenn sowohl in der einen als auch der anderen Disziplin zahlreiche etablierte Lehrveranstaltungen und Lehrbücher existieren, gilt dies nicht für...

Increasing technological development, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and the progressive development of mechatronic systems, will lead to an increase in self-driving autonomous systems (AS) in the foreseeable future. A multitude of the technical innovations required for the development of AS may be used for both civilian an...

In the digital age, the vision of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is vibrant. Research is being conducted worldwide to integrate AVs into our everyday lives in the future, spending considerable amounts of money in the development process. Actors from both engineering as well as social sciences are involved in this research, with technical disciplines str...

Gathering cyber threat intelligence from open sources is becoming increasingly important for maintaining and achieving a high level of security as systems become larger and more complex. However, these open sources are often subject to information overload. It is therefore useful to apply machine learning models that condense the amount of informat...

Within CSCW and HCI, an increasing body of literature has been demonstrating the essential relevance of infrastructures and infrastructuring to the work of people engaging in technologically mediated nomadicity. Tech Nomads – or T-Nomads, as they are sometimes called – not only rely on technological, human , and environmental infrastructural compon...

Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing a model's generalization capabilities, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training dat...

In the last decades, research has shown that both technical solutions and user perceptions are important to improve security and privacy in the digital realm. The field of ‘usable security’ already started to emerge in the mid-90s, primarily focussed on password and email security. Later on, the research field of ”usable security and privacy” evolv...

Business collaboration in the era of digital transformation requires the exchange of operational data. Since data are hardly controllable once they have been published or shared with others, it is highly important that users are clearly informed about who has access to which data and how certain settings can prevent the disclosure of sensitive data...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a major trend that is seen as a great opportunity to improve efficiency in many domains, including agriculture. This technology could transform the sector, improving the management and quality of agricultural operations, for example, crop farming. The most promising data transmission standard for this domain seems to...

In many cases of machine learning, research suggests that the development of training data might have a higher relevance than the choice and modelling of classifiers themselves. Thus, data augmentation methods have been developed to improve classifiers by artificially created training data. In NLP, there is the challenge of establishing universal r...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be impacting all industry sectors, while becoming a motor for innovation. The diffusion of AI from the civilian sector to the defense sector, and AI’s dual-use potential has drawn attention from security and ethics scholars. With the publication of the ethical guideline Trustworthy AI by the European Union (EU)...

Agriculture is subject to high demands regarding resilience as it is an essential component of the food production chain. In the agricultural sector, there is an increasing usage of digital tools that rely on communication and energy infrastructures. Should disruption occur, such strengthened dependencies on other infrastructures increase the proba...

The backbone network of submarine communication cables (SCC) carries 98% of international internet traffic. Coastal and island states strongly depend on this physical internet infrastructure to provide internet connectivity. Although about 100 SCC breakdowns of human or natural origin occur at yearly average, a literature review reveals that there...

Cryptography has become ubiquitous in communication technology and is considered a necessary part of information security. However, both the regulation to restrict access to cryptography, as well as practices to weaken or break encryption, are part of the States’ security policies. The United States (U.S.) regulate cryptography for export in intern...

Mit der globalen COVID-19-Pandemie und dem Hochwasser in West- und Mitteleuropa im Sommer 2021 hat unter anderem Deutschland in jüngster Vergangenheit zwei schwerwiegende Krisenszenarien erlebt. Die Auswirkungen auf die Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft sind verheerend. Parallel lassen sich Krisenereignisse im digitalen Raum, wie die Zunahme an Cyberkri...