It has been an exciting year for IT Security Research in Bochum. Our overview summarizes the most important news of the year.
Awards
At the beginning of December, Eike Kiltz (Chair of Cryptography) was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), considered to be the most important research award in Germany. The prize is endowed with 2.5 million euros.
Gregor Leander (Chair of Symmetric Cryptography) was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant: His project "SymTrust" will be funded with 2.5 million euros over a period of five years.
M. Angela Sasse has become a member of the Leopoldina: The professor of Cuman-Centred Security was appointed in recognition of her outstanding scientific achievements.
New Emmy Noether Group: Pascal Sasdrich (Chair of Security Engineering) received 1.3 million euros in funding from the DFG for his CAVE project.
Since April 2023, Yuval Yarom holds the Chair of Computer Security. In the year 2023 he won the Human-Competitive Award for a paper at the GECCO conference and a Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2023.
At this year's IEEE S&P, ITS researchers from Bochum won three Best Paper Awards.
Events/ Visits
Celebrate IT: On 10 May, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security and the foundation of the Faculty of Computer Science at the RUB with high-ranking guests such as Mona Neubaur, Deputy Minister President and Minister of Economic Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
During her inaugural visit to the RUB on 9 February, Ina Brandes, Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, took the opportunity for a personal dialogue on IT security research in Bochum.
At this year's CASA Summer School on Software Security from 14 to 16 August and at the Women in Security and Cryptography Workshop (WISC) from 27 to 29 June, international speakers gave interesting lectures on their research. As part of the workshop, the Faculty of Computer Science awarded an honorary doctorate to US IT Security researcher Tal Rabin.
At the "CASA meets Industry" day on 9 May, CASA scientists met with representatives from various market-leading companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Research and Intel Labs.
The SecHuman & CASA Spring School, 15-17 May, brought together PhD students and postdocs to discuss participatory IT security research and the methods associated with it. The SecHuman workshop "Trust and Resilience Digital Societies" on 6-7 November focused on reflections on the role that trust and resilience play in digital societies.
Public outreach
Two new issues of our Science Comics were published this year. In April, the CASA art installation DIS/PLAY was officially opened in the MC building at the RUB. In July, the science magazine "RUBIN" was published, in which we exclusively present topics related to IT Security in Bochum.
On this website you will find an overview of all podcasts about ITS in Bochum produced this year.
In November, we launched our new event format "CyBARsecurity", where scientists present their research projects in a friendly bar atmosphere.
What’s next?
Our goal for 2024 is to continue working hard to strengthen Bochum as an ITS hotspot. In addition to the SecHuman closing symposium, the following events are planned so far: the “Hardware Reverse Engineering Workshop” from 19 to 20 March 2024, the “Creative.Minds - Cyber Security Workshop for Women” from 22 to 24 March 2024 and the CASA Summer School, which will take place in Bochum from 26 to 30 August 2024 in cooperation with crypt@b-it.
We will keep you informed about further events on our website.
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.