arXiv subjects

Jan Tobias Muehlberg

Publications and source records attributed to Jan Tobias Muehlberg.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs

The discourse about sustainable technology has emerged from the acknowledgment of the environmental collapse we are facing. In this paper, we argue that addressing this crisis requires more than the development of sustainable alternatives to current online services or the optimization of resources using various dashboards and AI. Rather, the focus must shift toward designing technologies that protect us from the consequences of the environmental damages. Among these consequences, wars, genocide and new forms of colonialism are perhaps the most significant. We identify "protection" not in terms of military defense as Western States like to argue, but as part of sovereignty. We seek to define the term of "Resistance Technologies" for such technologies, arguing further that anti-surveillance technologies are a foundational component of sovereignty and must be part of future conversations around sustainability. Finally, our paper seeks to open a discourse with the Computing-within-Limits community and beyond, towards defining other essential aspects or concepts of technologies that we see as core values of "Resistance Technology".

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Automated Fuzzing of Automotive Control Units

Modern vehicles are governed by a network of Electronic Control Units (ECUs), which are programmed to sense inputs from the driver and the environment, to process these inputs, and to control actuators that, e.g., regulate the engine or even control the steering system. ECUs within a vehicle communicate via automotive bus systems such as the Controller Area Network (CAN), and beyond the vehicles boundaries through upcoming vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure channels. Approaches to manipulate the communication between ECUs for the purpose of security testing and reverse-engineering of vehicular functions have been presented in the past, all of which struggle with automating the detection of system change in response to message injection. In this paper we present our findings with fuzzing CAN networks, in particular while observing individual ECUs with a sensor harness. The harness detects physical responses, which we then use in a oracle functions to inform the fuzzing process. We systematically define fuzzers, fuzzing configurations and oracle functions for testing ECUs. We evaluate our approach based on case studies of commercial instrument clusters and with an experimental framework for CAN authentication. Our results show that the approach is capable of identifying interesting ECU states with a high level of automation. Our approach is applicable in distributed cyber-physical systems beyond automotive computing.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

The belief in Moore's Law is undermining ICT climate action

The growth of semiconductor technology is unprecedented, with profound transformational consequences for society. This includes feeding an over-reliance on digital solutions to systemic problems such as climate change ('techno-solutionism'). Such technologies come at a cost: environmental, social and material. We unpack topics arising from "The True Cost of ICT: From Materiality to Techno-Solutionism (TCICT)", a workshop held at the International ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) conference 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden -- exploring, as a matter of global climate injustice, the drivers and material dependencies of these technologies. We point to the importance of addressing ICT's impacts as a system, rather than purely in terms of efficiency and energy use. We conclude by calling to build a community of like-minded and critical colleagues to address the intersectional climate impacts of the semiconductor industry and the techno-solutionism it embodies.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Privacy and Security as Drivers for Environmental Sustainability in Cloud-Based Office Solutions (Extended Abstract)

This paper explores the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity, and environmental impacts, specifically energy consumption and carbon emissions, in cloud-based office solutions. We hypothesise that solutions that emphasise privacy and security are typically "greener" than solutions that are financed through data collection and advertising. To test our hypothesis, we first investigate how the underlying architectures and business models of these services, e.g., monetisation through (personalised) advertising, contribute to the services' environmental impact. We then explore commonly used methodologies and identify tools that facilitate environmental assessments of software systems. By combining these tools, we develop an approach to systematically assess the environmental footprint of the user-side of online services, which we apply to investigate and compare the influence of service design and ad-blocking technology on the emissions of common web-mail services. Our measurements of a limited selection of such services does not yet conclusively support or falsify our hypothesis regarding primary impacts. However, we are already able to identify the greener web-mail services on the user-side and continue the investigation towards conclusive assessment strategies for online office solutions.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Sustaining Security and Safety in ICT: A Quest for Terminology, Objectives, and Limits

Security and safety are intertwined concepts in the world of computing. In recent years, the terms "sustainable security" and "sustainable safety" came into fashion and are being used referring to a variety of systems properties ranging from efficiency to profitability, and sometimes meaning that a product or service is good for people and planet. This leads to confusing perceptions of products where customers might expect a sustainable product to be developed without child labour, while the producer uses the term to signify that their new product uses marginally less power than the previous generation of that products. Even in research on sustainably safe and secure ICT, these different notions of terminology are prevalent. As researchers we often work towards optimising our subject of study towards one specific sustainability metric - let's say energy consumption - while being blissfully unaware of, e.g., social impacts, life-cycle impacts, or rebound effects of such optimisations. In this paper I dissect the idea of sustainable safety and security, starting from the questions of what we want to sustain, and for whom we want to sustain it. I believe that a general "people and planet" answer is inadequate here because this form of sustainability cannot be the property of a single industry sector but must be addressed by society as a whole. However, with sufficient understanding of life-cycle impacts we may very well be able to devise research and development efforts, and inform decision making processes towards the use of integrated safety and security solutions that help us to address societal challenges in the context of the climate and ecological crises, and that are aligned with concepts such as intersectionality and climate justice. Of course, these solutions can only be effective if they are embedded in societal and economic change towards more frugal uses of data and ICT.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Upgrading the protection of children from manipulative and addictive strategies in online games: Legal and technical solutions beyond privacy regulation

Despite the increasing awareness from academia, civil society and media to the issue of child manipulation online, the current EU regulatory system fails at providing sufficient levels of protection. Given the universality of the issue, there is a need to combine and further these scattered efforts into a unitary, multidisciplinary theory of digital manipulation that identifies causes and effects, systematizes the technical and legal knowledge on manipulative and addictive tactics, and to find effective regulatory mechanisms to fill the legislative gaps. In this paper we discuss manipulative and exploitative strategies in the context of online games for children, suggest a number of possible reasons for the failure of the applicable regulatory system, propose an "upgrade" for the regulatory approach to address these risks from the perspective of freedom of thought, and present and discuss technological approaches that allow for the development of games that verifiably protect the privacy and freedoms of players.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

A Survey of Security and Privacy Issues in V2X Communication Systems

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is receiving growing attention from industry and academia as multiple pilot projects explore its capabilities and feasibility. With about 50\% of global road vehicle exports coming from the European Union (EU), and within the context of EU legislation around security and data protection, V2X initiatives must consider security and privacy aspects across the system stack, in addition to road safety. Contrary to this principle, our survey of relevant standards, research outputs, and EU pilot projects indicates otherwise; we identify multiple security and privacy related shortcomings and inconsistencies across the standards. We conduct a root cause analysis of the reasons and difficulties associated with these gaps, and categorize the identified security and privacy issues relative to these root causes. As a result, our comprehensive analysis sheds lights on a number of areas that require improvements in the standards, which are not explicitly identified in related work. Our analysis fills gaps left by other related surveys, which are focused on specific technical areas but not necessarily point out underlying root issues in standard specifications. We bring forward recommendations to address these gaps for the overall improvement of security and safety in vehicular communication.

cs.CR↗