Prof. Dr.-Ing. Volker Roth

About

I am a professor for computer science at Freie Universität Berlin where I head the Secure Identity Research Group since 2009.

Before, I was a senior researcher at a research lab in Palo Alto (FXPAL, now defunct), a visiting professor at the Peter Kiewit Institute of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the CTO of a tech company in Omaha (OGM Laboratories, now defunct), a senior researcher and deputy department head at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Germany, and a postdoc at ICSI in Berkeley. I received my "Dr.-Ing." (approx. Ph.D.) and my "Dipl.-Inform." (approx. M.Sc.) in computer science from Technische Hochschule Darmstadt.

My primary occupation is teaching and researching privacy and security in information systems, with a particular interest in the psychological acceptability of security mechanisms. I am particularly excited by security mechanism designs that are as simple as possible (but not simpler) and work without the need for a common root of trust.

Contact Information and Consultation Hour

Please find my contact information on a separate page. My consultation hour is Tuesdays at 18h. Please contact my administrative assistant to schedule a meeting.

If you are a student in the Bachelor degree program seeking approval of your choice of “Praktikum” then please make sure that you have read and understood the advice on this page prior to contacting me.

Recent and selected papers

  1. Christian Stransky, Oliver Wiese, Volker Roth, Yasemin Acar, Sascha Fahl. 2022. 27 Years and 81 Million Opportunities Later: Investigating the Use of Email Encryption for an Entire University. Proc. S&P. IEEE.
    Companion website
  2. Artemij Voskobojnikov, Oliver Wiese, Masoud Mehrabi Koushki, Volker Roth, and Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov. 2021. The U in Crypto Stands for Usable: An Empirical Study of User Experience with Mobile Cryptocurrency Wallets. Proc. CHI. ACM, Article 642, 1–14.
    Honorary Mention!
  3. Oliver Wiese and Volker Roth. 2016. See you next time: a model for modern shoulder surfers. Proc. MobileHCI. ACM, 453–464.
    Best Paper Award!
  4. Johannes Klick, Stephan Lau, Matthias Wählisch, and Volker Roth. 2016. Towards Better Internet Citizenship: Reducing the Footprint of Internet-wide Scans by Topology Aware Prefix Selection. Proc. IMC. ACM, 421–427.
  5. Benjamin Güldenring, Volker Roth, and Lars Ries. 2015. Knock Yourself Out: Secure Authentication with Short Re-Usable Passwords. Proc. NDSS. Internet Society.
  6. Volker Roth, Benjamin Güldenring, Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel, Sven Dietrich, Lars Ries. 2013. A Secure Submission System for Online Whistleblowing Platforms. Proc. Financial Cryptography. Springer Verlag, LNCS 7859, 354-361
  7. Volker Roth, Philipp Schmidt, and Benjamin Güldenring. 2010. The IR ring: authenticating users' touches on a multi-touch display. Proc. UIST. ACM, 259–262.
  8. Volker Roth and Thea Turner. 2009. Bezel swipe: conflict-free scrolling and multiple selection on mobile touch screen devices. Proc. CHI. ACM, 1523–1526.
    Demo on YouTube (predates iPhone SDK), synopsis
  9. Volker Roth, Wolfgang Polak, Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel, Thea Turner. 2008. Simple and effective defense against evil twin access points. Proc. WISEC. ACM, 220-235
  10. Volker Roth, Tobias Straub, and Kai Richter. 2005. Security and usability engineering with particular attention to electronic mail. Int'l J. of Human-Computer Studies, 63(1-2):51–73.
    INI-GraphicsNet Best System Paper Award 2006!
  11. Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Volker Roth, Ion Stoica, Scott Shenker, and Randy H. Katz. 2004. Listen and Whisper: Security Mechanisms for BGP. Proc. NSDI. USENIX, 127-140.
    Best Student Paper!
  12. Volker Roth, Kai Richter, and Rene Freidinger. 2004. A PIN-entry method resilient against shoulder surfing. Proc. CCS. ACM, 236–245.
    Synopsis
  13. Volker Roth. 2001. On the robustness of some cryptographic protocols for mobile agent protection. Proc. Mobile Agents, volume 2240 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Verlag.

The Attic

Below are two dated but perhaps still useful write-ups on how to configure diverse software and hardware.