This area deals primarily with the logical layer of IT security. There are several important projects in this area: First, our successful e-health privacy research, which has already led to a patented procedure and a stable proof of concept prototype. These results need to be closely examined for large-scale suitability, robustness against external and internal attacks, structural or logical weaknesses in the architecture, and applicability to specific scenarios. Second, our new project Digital Preservation deals with problems that arise in the context of long-time storage of digital data, which we see as an emerging challenge for the future. Third, we will develop new Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) approaches and solutions for the protection and authentication of confidential documents and company files (explicitly avoiding research related to the content industry’s largely futile attempts to protect multimedia content). The overall, unifying research challenge we see in this area is primarily to address the conflicting requirements of privacy, ERM, and digital preservation.
