In October 2024, part of Prof. Dr. Florian Adamsky’s System and Network Security research group attended an IT security conference in the USA. It was the 31st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Salt Lake City. Prof. Dr. Florian Adamsky works at the Institute for Information Systems and is a specialist in the field of IT security.
Katharina Schiller and Sebastian Pahl, both research associates in the group, attended the conference and each gave a presentation. At its core, this conference deals with computer and communication security. It is also one of the best in the world and other renowned research institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Princeton and ETH Zurich also present their research results.
Prof. Adamsky, you attended one of the most prestigious international conferences in the field of IT security this autumn. You and your research group submitted two papers there, which were also accepted. What were the topics of the two publications?
The first paper is about the acceptance and perception of phishing simulations. Phishing simulations involve deliberately sending phishing emails to employees in order to train them to recognize suspicious emails. Many companies rely on this new form of awareness training. However, little is known about employee perceptions of this measure and there are suggestions that it has a negative impact on employee confidence. We conducted a quantitative survey of 757 employees and then qualitative interviews with 22 participants to gain deeper insights into perceptions of phishing simulations.
The second paper, which was presented at a workshop at the CCS, is about anonymity networks. Anonymity networks protect privacy on the internet and also offer protection against surveillance and tracking. The best-known anonymity network is Tor, but it is slow. We presented a new type of network based on virtual private networks (VPN) and showed that it is faster than Tor for larger data transfers.
Why did you choose this particular conference?
There are countless scientific conferences and journals, and it is difficult to separate the important papers from the less important ones. This is why there are indicators such as the impact factor for journals and the acceptance rate for conferences. As scientists, we are naturally interested in our research work being visible, which is why we also try to address conferences with a low acceptance rate. The ACM CCS is one of four A* conferences in the field of IT security and had an acceptance rate of 16.9% in the international competition this year. Such work is therefore also important for the future career opportunities of doctoral students.
What suggestions are you taking back from the trip? How does this affect the work in the research group?
As a lot of good work is presented there, we get new impulses and ideas for our own research. This allows us to exchange ideas with other scientists and possibly establish new research collaborations.
Is this your first time at this conference?
Yes, this was our first participation. Although we also had a paper at a top-class conference last year, we have not yet been to the ACM CCS.
Our aim was to give good presentations and take away lots of new ideas. In my opinion, that definitely worked out very well.
And what experiences did your employees Sebastian Pahl and Katharina Schiller have? How did the young people do?
Both doctoral students have already published papers and have therefore already gained experience at scientific conferences. Both presented our work very well and answered all the questions from the interested scientists.
A trip like this is not exactly cheap. What does the funding look like?
Our Vice President for Research, Valentin Plenk, recognized that presenting our research work at scientific conferences further strengthens the international reputation of Hof University of Applied Sciences and was able to make it possible for us to participate. Another part comes from the ERDF project M4-SKI, which is headed by Prof. Peinl.
Where will the next conference trip take you?
We can’t say yet. We are submitting two more scientific papers in November, but as the acceptance rate is very low and we have to go through a strict peer review, we can’t yet say whether it will work.
