Project description

SecHuman is a transdiciplinary graduate-college in which tandems of doctoral students work on contemporary technical and societal challenges of IT security. These tandems are joined by a field-partner (enterprise, NGO,…). The focus of the research topic ‘Learning processes in IT security’ lies on problem solving processes during the so-called hardware reverse-engineering of embedded systems. During reverse-engineering, analysts need to find the connections between the system’s components and make sense of these connections in order to understand the functionality of the embedded system. The research is interested in processes of problem solving and the (resulting) acquisition of expertise during reverse-engineering. Further, the projects aims at quantifying the human factor during reverse-engineering and seeks to find interventions that hamper successful reverse-engineering or deem it impossible for attackers.