Christoph Steup | Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (original) (raw)

Cyber Defense Publications by Christoph Steup

Espionage plays a major role in military and paramilitary cyber warfare activities. While cyber e... more Espionage plays a major role in military and paramilitary cyber warfare activities. While cyber espionage is mainly considered as the act of obtaining (confi dential) information using illegal, technical methods, we have explored the possibilities of obtaining confi dential material with technical methods using legal exploits. Due to routing conventions, messages containing confi dential information may be sent through different states and herewith through confl icting communities. The servers that are used in this routing process are subject to the corresponding states legal system. In the case of electronic mail (e-mail), backups or copies being made are accessible to the corresponding authorities and/or private institutions. These copies of e-mails may be requested without knowledge of the sender or the sender's state and can be kept for an uncontrollable period of time. This may also heighten the risk of disclosure for encrypted messages. We have developed a concept based on IPv6 to allow static and dynamic adjustment of the selected routes to maintain the specifi ed or expected level of confi dentiality. This concept may be developed further to be used as a privacy enhancing technology. The concept increases the level of control of transmitted data, technically enforces the expected or negotiated level of privacy and confi dentiality, allows data tracking and heightens the user's awareness regarding the differences between postal and electronic mail.

The effects of globalisation and information welfare combined with the increasing mobility of ind... more The effects of globalisation and information welfare combined with the increasing mobility of individuals lead to a number of challenges to modern states. In order to guarantee a smooth, secure, uninterrupted organisational flow, governments and their subsidiaries need to cooperate and exchange data on individuals and organisations across national borders. However, insufficiently secured communication of such data imposes security threats which may endanger the individual’s privacy. Currently, several states within Europe develop and operate e-governance systems. These are primarily designed to allow the exchange of data within the institutions of one state. However, examples such as the Estonian e-governance backbone system X-Road strive towards an EU-wide expansion. Technical solutions for the transnational exchange of data between governmental institutions are an unavoidable part of the future of cyberspace. Despite the fact that EU specifications exist, the discrepancy between specification and implementation becomes immanent. This article explores some of the general aspects of the design of secure transnational data exchange frameworks. A comparative analysis of existing e-governance systems within Europe is given based on defined security aspects. It is explored how decisions made in the design may affect the security of the underlying network and its components. The challenges of transnational data exchange frameworks are discussed.

By 2012 the U.S. military had increased its investment in research and production of unmanned aer... more By 2012 the U.S. military had increased its investment in research and production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from 2.3billionin2008to2.3 billion in 2008 to 2.3billionin2008to4.2 billion [1]. Currently UAVs are used for a wide range of missions such as border surveillance, reconnaissance, transportation and armed attacks. UAVs are presumed to provide their services at any time, be reliable, automated and autonomous. Based on these presumptions, governmental and military leaders expect UAVs to improve national security through surveillance or combat missions. To fulfill their missions, UAVs need to collect and process data. Therefore, UAVs may store a wide range of information from troop movements to environmental data and strategic operations. The amount and kind of information enclosed make UAVs an extremely interesting target for espionage and endangers UAVs of theft, manipulation and attacks.

Papers by Christoph Steup

Aktuelle Forschungsprojekte propagieren die unmittelbare Interaktion von Robotern mit Menschen im... more Aktuelle Forschungsprojekte propagieren die unmittelbare Interaktion von Robotern mit Menschen im privaten wie im industriellen Bereich. Die dafür nötige fehlertolerante und flexible Umgebungserfassung stellt die bestehenden zentralistisch und statisch orientierten Konzepte vor große Probleme. Geht man aber davon aus, das die Informationen aller Sensor-Aktor-Systeme innerhalb einer intelligenten Umgebung verbreitet werden, so kann auf dieser Basis eine dynamische, adaptive und damit fehlertolerantere Aggregation von Messdaten umgesetzt werden. Diese Arbeit untersucht die aus diesem Konzept resultierenden Anforderungen, beschreibt die darauf aufbauend entwickelte Architektur und illustriert anhand eines Beispielszenarios die Vorteile des Ansatzes.

2015 IEEE 20th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA), 2015

2014 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, 2014

ABSTRACT

Affective Human Computer Interaction (HCI) craves not only the adaptation of technical systems to... more Affective Human Computer Interaction (HCI) craves not only the adaptation of technical systems to specific users but also the capability of shaping positive interactions. In order to encourage interaction, the system must be able to invoke and re-establish positive-neutral emotions in users to accomplish the task of positive dialogue management. It is widely accepted that acoustical variations in music sequences have an impact on the emotional perception and on the listeners' emotion. However, investigations regarding the influence of voice variations on listeners' emotion or emotional perception are rare. The closest related research is conducted within emotional speech synthesis, where the perception of emotionally coloured synthesized speech is investigated to determine the naturalness of synthesized emotional speech. A possible explanation for the absence of results on the influence of acoustical parameter variations on emotional perception and dialogue evolvement is the...

2013 IEEE International Symposium on Robotic and Sensors Environments (ROSE), 2013

Providing applications with a perfectly tailored device driver is es- sential to avoid the waste ... more Providing applications with a perfectly tailored device driver is es- sential to avoid the waste of resources. This is even necessary for the broad field of embedded systems development. However, the development of device drivers is in general a difficult task, and supporting a portable, configurable as well as adaptable device driver is even harder. We exploit declarative configuration specifications, template-metaprogramming and the concept of RegisterMaps to achieve such a device driver architecture. We evaluate the device driver architecture, showing that the device drivers resource usage scales with different configurations. We compare our device driver architecture against a device driver implementation of a hardware vendor, proving the competitiveness of our solution.

2011 IEEE International Symposium on Robotic and Sensors Environments (ROSE), 2011

ABSTRACT The position of a mobile robot can be determined very precise today. A large number of h... more ABSTRACT The position of a mobile robot can be determined very precise today. A large number of high level sensor systems in combination with processing algorithms running on powerful hardware can provide (nearly) every requirement. But in case of limited financial and computational resources new approaches beside laser scanners and stereo cameras are necessary. In this paper we propose a localization system motivated by RoboCup Junior competitions but also suitable for similar applications. The paper describes the theoretical investigation of a multi sensor system, based on this the implementation with real hardware and its validation.

2014 IEEE International Symposium on Robotic and Sensors Environments (ROSE) Proceedings, 2014

The Carolo-Cup competition conducted for the eighth time this year, is an international student c... more The Carolo-Cup competition conducted for the eighth time this year, is an international student competition focusing on autonomous driving scenarios implemented on 1:10 scale car models. Three practical sub-competitions have to be realized in this context and represent a complex, interdisciplinary challenge. Hence, students have to cope with all core topics like mechanical development, electronic design, and programming as addressed usually by robotic applications.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

We propose a cyber-physical platform that combines road traffic simulation, network simulation, a... more We propose a cyber-physical platform that combines road traffic simulation, network simulation, and physically simulated vehicles to facilitate extensive testing on various levels of vehicular systems. Our design integrates physical and digital vehicle simulation into a common development and testing environment. This paper describes the platform design and presents prototypical implementations that use Simulator of Urban Mobility (SUMO), TinyOS Simulator (TOSSIM), a 3D sensor simulation environment, and a test-bed of miniature vehicles called Gulliver. As a prototypical implementation, we demonstrate the development of cooperative applications, and by that we achieve: (a) a cyber-physical system that provides a common environment for physically and digitally simulated vehicles, (b) a platform to interface communication between physically and digitally simulated vehicles, and (c) the ability to tailor testing scenarios in which some system components are simulated digitally and some physically.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIVEMSA), 2014

ABSTRACT The idea of “smart sensing” includes a permanent monitoring and evaluation of sensor dat... more ABSTRACT The idea of “smart sensing” includes a permanent monitoring and evaluation of sensor data related to possible measurement faults. This concept requires a fault detection chain covering all relevant fault types of a specific sensor. Additionally, the fault detection components have to provide a high precision in order to generate a reliable quality indicator. Due to the large spectrum of sensor faults and their specific characteristics these goals are difficult to meet and error prone. The developer manually determines the specific sensor characteristics, indicates a set of detection methods, adjusts parameters and evaluates the composition. In this paper we exploit neural-network approaches in order to provide a general solution covering typical sensor faults and to replace complex sets of individual detection methods. For this purpose, we identify an appropriate set of fault relevant features in a first step. Secondly, we determine a generic neural-network structure and learning strategy adaptable for detecting multiple fault types. Afterwards the approach is applied on a common used sensor system and evaluated with deterministic fault injections.

Digital Signal Processing Publications by Christoph Steup

25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI 2013)