Welcome at the Cybersecurity, Human Factors, and Enterprise Security Studies (CHESS) Lab! We are a research group at the CISPA Helmholtz Center For Information Security in Saarland, Germany.

We are cybersecurity researchers! Our research is about human factors in cybersecurity, specifically focusing on cybersecurity in organizations. We deploy interdisciplinary methods from computer science, psychology, human-computer interaction, sociology, and economics. These can include interviews, surveys, web crawling, diaries, prototyping, and technical analysis. We closely work together with organizations and cybersecurity leaders. We also work on cybersecurity and usability issues of industrial control systems.

As our research is highly empirical, our teaching aims to develop skills with practical relevance.

As part of CISPA, the world’s leading cybersecurity research institution, we strive for excellence with a positive impact on our societies, organizations, and individuals. Our work is regularly published at the leading venues of cybersecurity and human-computer interaction, such as USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, ACM CSS, ISOC NDSS, ACM CHI, and USENIX SOUPS.

Please reach out, if you want to collaborate.

Join the Team! 🎓❤️😎

We are currently looking for PhD students who are enthusiastic about our research.

News

• June 2025: CHESS Lab was officially launched. 🚀
• April 2025: Together with MaxLAB we are teaching the seminar Cybersecurity in Organizational Practice at Saarland University this semester.

Contact

Dr.-Ing. Jonas Hielscher
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Building D1, Room 2.16
Kaiserstr. 21, 66386 St. Ingbert, Germany
firstname.lastname@cispa.de