As the Christmas season approaches and 2025 draws to a close, we would like to wish you cheerful holidays, restful winter days with your friends and family, and a successful start to the new year.
A Strong Year for Cybersecurity Research in Bochum
2025 was an outstanding year for Bochum Cybersecurity. The most important milestone was the positive decision by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to continue funding the Cluster of Excellence CASA for another seven years with 43 million euros, from 2026-2032. Within “CASA – Securing the Digital Society,” researchers will further strengthen the resilience of our digital society. Foci will include, amongst others, quantum security, AI-based disinformation and societal polarization, and new defenses against ransomware.
Research Excellence in 2025
Bochum researchers received numerous Best Paper Awards at top-tier conferences, including NDSS, IEEE S&P, IEEE CSF, ACM SIGSOFT, USENIX Security, and ACM CCS. These awards were given out to publications covering topics such as JavaScript engine fuzzing, type confusion prevention, speculative execution attacks, mechanized speculative load hardening, benchmarking in machine learning for vulnerability detection, propaganda detection on Telegram, and the security of SSH client signatures. (Find details on papers and awards here.)
Three foundational publications received Test of Time Awards: “Difference Target Propagation” (Fischer et al., 2014) at ECML PKDD, “A Modular Analysis of the Fujisaki–Okamoto Transformation” (Kiltz et al., 2017) at Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) and “CUJO: Efficient Detection and Prevention of Drive by Download Attacks" (Rieck at al., 2010) at Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC).
New Appointments
In 2025, we welcomed Rebekah Overdorf as Professor for Security and Trustworthiness of Online Information and Julian Loss as Professor for Distributed Cryptography, strengthening Bochum’s expertise in security, privacy, and cryptographic research.
Events and Community
Three events took place in June: The Women in Security and Cryptography (WISC) Workshop brought around 50 participants to Bochum for three days of excellent talks, workshops, poster sessions, and discussions.
The CASA & RC Trust Summer School 2025 focused on AI and security, welcoming over 60 researchers and students for great exchanges.
(Find details for the Summer School 2026 here)
The HGI Cybersec Day combined scientific sessions with the celebration of 25 years of IT Security Studies at RUB within a nice summer atmosphere. Watch the video here.
The three-day CASA Retreat in September in Bad Driburg offered members time to discuss research and reflect on future collaborations. Watch the video here.
At our science in the pub event “CyBARsecurity” in July, researchers presented their work in a relaxed bar atmosphere, fostering dialogue beyond academia.
(Details on the next CyBar in January here.)
Further, we welcomed several top speakers at our CASA Distinguished Lectures. You can watch the recordings here.
Transfer
Our in-house startup incubator Cube 5 supported a total of eight teams with funding under the BMFTR StartUpSecure and StartUpConnect guidelines. A list of the supported startups can be found here.
Outreach
In 2025, we released two new episodes of our CASA Stories video series. CASA PI Ghassan Karame shares insights into his daily work and how CASA supports a positive research environment, while CASA PI Yuval Yarom reflects on his career journey and research life since joining RUB in 2023.
Additionally, ARTE featured cryptography in its science series “42 – The Answer to Almost Everything,” following Eike Kiltz (CASA spokesperson) and Peter Schwabe (MPI-SP Director) on campus and offering fascinating insights into this crucial area of research.
We would like to thank everyone who contributed to making 2025 such a successful year for cybersecurity research in Bochum. We look forward to continuing this momentum in the coming year.
General note: In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.