Welcome
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 and privacy, 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 worldβs 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.
News
- February 2026: Jonas gave two guest lectures at the WITS University in Johannesburg and at the Cape Town University.
- February 2026: Maike presented our team at the ThesisXCISPAEvent.
- December 2025: We are seeking applications for a masterβs thesis about βeasy language.β
- October 2025: Maike Raphael joined Chess Lab as a Phd Researcher and Anastasiia Melnyk joined as a research assistant. ππ©βππ¨πΌβππ
- August 2025: Christina Subedi joined Chess Lab as a research immersion lab intern and Farbod Behnam joined as a research assistant. Welcome! π©βππ¨πΌβπ
- July 2025: Nadeen Ibrahim joined Chess Lab as a research assistant. π©βπ
- July 2025: One paper got accepted at ACM CCS β25.
- July 2025: Jonas Schmitt got accepted to the CISPA Excellence Program and will work under the supervision of the CHESS Lab. π¨πΌβπ
- June 2025: CHESS Lab was officially launched. π
- 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