Today we were very happy to host NRW’s minister of science Svenja Schulze and Fraunhofer’s Director of Science Dr. Raoul Klingner for the official inauguration of Fraunhofer IEM. The new institute is the first to be founded within NRW within the past 20 years, and was bootstrapped in just about seven years – a new record in the Fraunhofer Society.

Our new S&P paper Hardening Java’s Access Control by Abolishing Implicit Privilege Elevation is now available online. It is a follow-up work to our previous CCS’16 paper An In-Depth Study of More Than Ten Years of Java Exploitation. In this former paper we classified a large number of history Java exploits. In doing so, we found that the largest class of exploits was made possible by shortcuts in Java’s implementation of access control. In the S&P paper we now show that it is possible to go without those shortcuts, without any loss of performance. We also discuss the usability implications that this removal of shortcuts would have.

Steven, Siegfried and I have just completed our invited paper for MOBILESoft’17. The paper The Soot-based Toolchain For Analyzing Android Apps summarizes for the first time the Soot-based tool chain for analyzing Android apps that we have built up over the past years. We hope you will enjoy the read!

And if you attend ICSE, maybe consider attending MOBILESoft as well, and you will be able to attend my keynote talk.

The local television interviewed me today on Smart Home Security. You can watch the video here. Skip to about 9 minutes.