Dr. Simon Rohlmann received the IT Security Dissertation Prize on April 10th in Worms by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST e.V.) and the IT Security Department of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) for his exceptional dissertation "On the Security of Signatures in Digital Documents."
Rohlmann´s research centers around significant vulnerabilities in the security of signatures in established document formats such as PDF, ODF, and OOXML. Through a series of attacks, he demonstrated how these weaknesses could be exploited for automated code execution and document tampering without invalidating the signature. The doctoral studies resulted in 15 CVE entries, adjustments in leading document viewers, significantly enhancing document format security.
On July 6th, 2023, Dr. Rohlmann achieved "Summa cum laude" honors upon completing his dissertation at the Faculty of Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jörg Schwenk (Chair of Network and Data Security), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Juraj Somorovsky (University of Paderborn), and Prof. Dr. Martin Johns (TU Braunschweig). Since April 2023, he has served as a tandem professor for IT Security/Information Security at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz. His colleague, Dr. Jan Richter-Brockmann, doctoral graduate from the Faculty of Computer Science (Chair of Security Engineering), was also a finalist for the dissertation prize.
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