With ongoing developments in the field of smart cities and digitalization in general, data is becoming a driving factor and value stream for new and existing economies alike. However, there exists an increasing centralization and monopolization of data holders and service providers, especially in the form of the big US-based technology companies in the western world and central technology providers with close ties to the government in the Asian regions. Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) provides the technical building blocks to create decentralized data-driven systems, which bring data autonomy back to the users. In this paper we propose a system in which the combination of SSI and token economy based incentivisation strategies makes it possible to unlock the potential value of data-pools without compromising the data autonomy of the users.

In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics providers to gain insights into visitor behavior. For security and privacy, website owners need to be aware of the content they provide their users. However, in reality, they often do not know which third parties are embedded, for example, when these third parties request additional content as it is common in real-time ad auctions. In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study to analyze the magnitude of these new challenges. To better reflect the connectedness of third parties, we measured their relations in a model we call third party trees, which reflects an approximation of the loading dependencies of all third parties embedded into a given website. Using this concept, we show that including a single third party can lead to subsequent requests from up to eight additional services. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the third parties embedded on a page load are not always deterministic, as 50 % of the branches in the third party trees change between repeated visits. In addition, we found that 93 % of the analyzed websites embedded third parties that are located in regions that might not be in line with the current legal framework. Our study also replicates previous work that mostly focused on landing pages of websites. We show that this method is only able to measure a lower bound as subsites show a significant increase of privacy-invasive techniques. For example, our results show an increase of used cookies by about 36 % when crawling websites more deeply.

The set of transactions that occurs on the public ledger of an Ethereum network in a specific time frame can be represented as a directed graph, with vertices representing addresses and an edge indicating the interaction between two addresses. While there exists preliminary research on analyzing an Ethereum network by the means of graph analysis, most existing work is focused on either the public Ethereum Mainnet or on analyzing the different semantic transaction layers using static graph analysis in order to carve out the different network properties (such as interconnectivity, degrees of centrality, etc.) needed to characterize a blockchain network. By analyzing the consortium-run bloxberg Proof-of-Authority (PoA) Ethereum network, we show that we can identify suspicious and potentially malicious behaviour of network participants by employing statistical graph analysis. We thereby show that it is possible to identify the potentially malicious exploitation of an unmetered and weakly secured blockchain network resource. In addition, we show that Temporal Network Analysis is a promising technique to identify the occurrence of anomalies in a PoA Ethereum network.

Die Digitalisierung ist die Basis für das Wohlergehen unserer modernen und globalen Informations- und Wissensgesellschaft und schreitet immer schneller voran. Dabei eröffnet die Digitalisierung über alle Branchen und Unternehmensgrößen hinweg enorme Wachstumschancen und führt zu immer besseren Prozessen, die die Effizienz steigern und Kosten reduzieren. Der Digitalisierungsprozess beschleunigt auf allen Ebenen und der Wertschöpfungsanteil der IT in allen Produkten und Lösungen wird immer größer. Die möglichen Erfolgsfaktoren der Digitalisierung sind vielfältig: Die Kommunikationsgeschwindigkeiten und -qualitäten, die mit 5G- und Glasfasernetzen neue Anwendungen möglich machen. Die Smartness der Endgeräte, wie Smartwatches, Smartphones, PADs, IoT-Geräte usw., die viele neue positive Möglichkeiten mit sich bringt. Aber auch immer leistungsfähigere zentrale IT-Systeme, wie Cloud-Angebote, Hyperscaler, KI-Anwendungen usw., schaffen Innovationen mit großen Potenzialen. Moderne Benutzerschnittstellen, wie Sprache und Gestik, vereinfachen die Bedienung für die Nutzer. Die Optimierung von Prozessen schafft ein enormes Rationalisierungspotenzial, das es zu heben gilt, um wettbewerbsfähig zu bleiben und die Wachstumschancen für unser Wohlergehen zu nutzen. Neue Möglichkeiten mit Videokonferenzen, Cloud-Anwendungen usw., im Homeoffice zu arbeiten und damit die Personenmobilität zu reduzieren und die Umwelt zu schonen.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) sorgt für eine sichere und vertrauenswürdige Digitalisierung. Nutzer können selbstbestimmt ihre digitale Identität und Nachweise wie Ausweis oder Bescheinigungen an Anwendungen weitergeben. Das europäische SSI-Ökosystem löst Abhängigkeiten von Monopolisten und gibt uns die Freiheit, die digitale Zukunft souverän und zügig zu gestalten.