Research

Scientific Excellence

Information technology has become a substantial part of our everyday life. This rapid progress opens up many opportunities, but also holds dangers. They range from Internet fraud to large-scale attacks on business and governments, in which cybercriminals spy on, sabotage and steal sensitive data. Creating long-term security against criminal attackers - that is the goal of the HGI, Part of the Key Research Area "Digital Society & Information Security" of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

At the HGI, more than 160 scientists and their research groups from the fields of computer science, electrical engineering and information technology as well as the humanities and social sciences conduct research. In this unique interdisciplinary environment, almost all aspects of IT security are covered.

As one of the most renowned and largest institutions for basic research in IT security, the HGI offers outstanding opportunities for young scientists to start their career within a structured doctoral program. It is home to the NRW research colleges NERD and SecHuman (2016-2024) as well as the Cluster of Excellence CASA.

In the Graduate Schools of the Cluster of Excellence, doctoral students can benefit from numerous seminars, training courses and other activities that can deepen their academic and personal development.

Quicklinks

CASA International Graduate School

NERD

Jobs

Cluster of Excellence CASA - Securing the Digital Society

CASA is a leading center for excellent cybersecurity research at Ruhr University Bochum. Through an innovative and interdisciplinary research program, CASA strengthens the resilience of the digital society. Internationally renowned researchers work together to develop next-generation security solutions that holistically protect large-scale socio-technical systems.

This constellation is unique in Europe. Launched in 2019, the cluster will receive €52 million in funding from the DFG in its second project phase (2025–2032).

To the Website

0 Professors

0 PhDs and Postdocs

0 Publications from the most prominent conferences

0 Best Paper Awards at top conferences since 2019

0 ERC Grants

Publications and Awards

More than 200 publications at the most important IT security and cryptography conferences and 16 Best Paper Awards in recent years make the HGI one of the world's most successful research institutions and the European leader in the field.

This excellence is also reflected in a large number of renowned scientific awards and funding programs with which our research has been recognized. For example, the HGI has now acquired nine grants from the European Research Council (ERC Grants).

Some of our most significant honours include:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize: 2024
Sofja Kovalevskaja Award: 2010
IACR Fellowship: 2016

ERC Advanced Grant: 2016, 2021, 2022
ERC Consolidator Grant: 2013, 2021
ERC Starting Grant: 2016, 2018, 2022, 2023, 2024

DFG Heisenberg Professorship: 2015
DFG Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize: 2011, 2023
DFG Emmy Noether Program: 2010, 2015. 2023

Prämierte Paper

2019

Best Paper Award: Moradi et al., "Glitch-Resistant Masking Revisited", CHES
NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award & Distinguished Paper Award: Yarom et al., Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution, IEEE S&P
Best Paper Award: Yarom et al., Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction, EuroSy

2020

Best Paper Award: Leander et al., “Improved Differential-Linear Attacks with Applications to ARX Ciphers“, CRYPTO
Best Paper Award: Paar et al., "The Unpatchable Silicon: A Full Break of the Bitstream Encryption of Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs", USENIX Security
Test of Time Award: Cha et al., "Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy", International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

2021

Best Paper Award: Schwenk et al., "XSinator.com: From a Formal Model to the Automatic Evaluation of Cross-Site Leaks in Web Browsers", ACM CCS
Distinguished Paper Award: Hritcu et al., "SSProve: A Foundational Frame-work for Modular Cryptographic Proofs in Coq", IEEE CSF

2022

Distinguished Paper Award: Rieck et al., “Dos and Don'ts of Machine Learning in Computer Security“, USENIX Security
Distinguished Artifact Award: Holz et al., “Fuzzware: Using Precise MMIO Modeling for Effective Firmware Fuzzing“, USENIX Security
Distinguished Paper Award: Naiakshina et al., “Let’s Hash: Helping Developers with Password Security“, SOUPS - Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
IACR Test-of-Time Award 2022: Lange et al., "Faster Addition and Doubling on Elliptic Curves", Asiacrypt
Test of Time Award: Cha et al., "I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World's Largest User Generated Content Video System", ACM SIGCOMM

2023

Distinguished Paper Award: Paar et al., “Red Team vs. Blue Team: A Real-World Hardware Trojan Detection Case Study Across Four Modern CMOS Technology Generations”, IEEE S&P
Distinguished Paper Award: Schwabe et al., “Typing High-Speed Cryptography against Spectre v1”, IEEE S&P
Distinguished Paper Award: Yarom et al., “CryptOpt: Verified Compilation with Randomized Program - Search for Cryptographic Primitives”, PLDI
Distinguished Paper Award & 2. Platz des Internet Defense Prize: Holz et al, "Fuzztruction: Using Fault Injection-based Fuzzing to Leverage Implicit Domain Knowledge", USENIX Security
Distinguished Artifact Award: Schwenk et al., “We Really Need to Talk About Session Tickets: A Large-Scale Analysis of Cryptographic Dangers with TLS Session Tickets”, USENIX Security
Poster Award: Marky et al., “...It's very unacceptable for someone to peek into your privacy.' Chronicles of Shoulder Surfing: Exploring Deep into a Longitudinal Diary Study.", SOUPS - Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
Best Paper Award: Sasse et al., “As Usual, I Needed Assistance of a Seeing Person: Experiences and Challenges of People with Disabilities and Authentication Methods”, STAST - International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security

2024

Test of Time Award: Sasse et al., "Users are not the enemy", USEC - Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy
Best Paper Award: Stennes et al., "Cryptanalysis of HALFLOOP Block Ciphers: Destroying HALFLOOP-24", IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology & FSE (Fast Software Encryption)
Test of Time Award: Rieck et al., “Modeling and Discovering Vulnerabilities with Code Property Graphs”, IEEE S&P
Test of Time Award: Barthe et al., "Secure Information Flow by Self-Composition", IEEE CSF
Distinguished Paper Award & Distinguished Artifact Award: Brinkmann et al., "Terrapin Attack: Breaking SSH Channel Integrity By Sequence Number Manipulation", USENIX Security
Distinguished Paper Award: Kirchner et al., "Dancer in the Dark: Synthesizing and Evaluating Polyglots for Blind Cross-Site Scripting", USENIX Security
Distinguished Paper Award: Yarom et al., "Spec-o-Scope: Cache Probing at Cache Speed", ACM CCS
Distinguished Paper Award: Yarom et al., "Testing Side-Channel Security of Cryptographic Implementations Against Future Microarchitectures"; ACM CCS

2025

Distinguished Paper Award: Toffalini et al., "type++: Prohibiting Type Confusion with Inline Type Information", NDSS
Distinguished Paper Award: Toffalini et al., "DUMPLING: Fine-grained Differential JavaScript Engine Fuzzing", NDSS
Distinguished Paper Award: Yarom et al., "SLAP: Data Speculation Attacks via Load Address Prediction on Apple Silicon", IEEE S&P
Google Research Scholar für Flavio Toffalini
Distinguished Paper Award: Hritcu et al., "FSLH: Flexible Mechanized Speculative Load Hardening", IEEE CSF
Test of Time Award: Kiltz et al., "A Modular Analysis of the Fujisaki-Okamoto Transformation", TCC
Distinguished Paper Award: Böhme et al., “Top Score on the Wrong Exam: On Benchmarking in Machine Learning for Vulnerability Detection”, ACM SIGSOFT
Distinguished Paper Award: Johns et al., “Confusing Value with Enumeration: Studying the Use of CVEs in Academia”, USENIX Security
Distinguished Paper Award: Overdorf, Troncoso et al., "Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram", USENIX Security
Distinguished Paper Award: Schwenk et al., “On the Security of SSH Client Signatures”, ACM CCS
Test of Time Award: Fischer et al., "Difference Target Propagation", ECML
Test of Time Award: Rieck et al., "CUJO: Efficient Detection and Prevention of Drive by Download Attacks", ACSAC

2026

Test of Time Award: May et al., "Implicit Factoring: On Polynomial Time Factoring Given Only an Implicit Hint", PKC
Test of Time Award: Davi et al., "ROPdefender: A Detection Tool to Defend Against Return-Oriented Programming Attacks“, ACM Asia CCS
Most Influential POPL Paper Award: Hrițcu et al., "Dependent Types and Multi-monadic Effects in F*", SIGPLAN

Interdisciplinarity

The challenges we currently face in IT security are multifaceted, which is why they must be met with an approach that is accordingly comprehensive and integrative. To that end, the HGI brings together a broad and diverse group of researchers from a variety of disciplines. Currently, 26 professors lead research groups with members representing electrical engineering and information technology as well as the humanities and social sciences. They conduct investigations into nearly all aspects related to IT security, from basic research in cryptography, AI security, Internet and hardware security to user behaviour and legal frameworks.

To support interdisciplinary collaboration sustainably, we organize regularly scheduled events and meetings such as the lecture series "IT Security for the Humanities and Social Sciences" and "Principles and Research Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences for IT Security". The institute's graduate schools also fully embrace an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary Identity Protection on the Internet research group (a-i3, Identitätsschutz im Internet e.V.), which was established at the Ruhr-University Bochum in 2005, organizes an extremely well regarded annual symposium in conjunction with the Federal Office for Information Security.

Website

The HGI played a leading role in the conception of the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS). The CAIS was founded in 2017 in Bochum to engage in interdisciplinary research on social, economic, legal, political and technological aspects related to digitalization. To this end, the Center organizes events and working groups and invites experts from academia and industry to spend up to six months as fellows at the institute, where they can carry out work on their projects related to internet research.

Website

SecHuman (Security for People in Cyberspace) was, from 2016 to 2024, a graduate research training program organized jointly with the TU Dortmund and the University for Applied Sciences Dortmund. SecHuman focused on six key topics in IT security: security and privacy post-Snowden; the private sphere as a human right; strategies for speech impersonation and disguise; the question what social networks and sensors reveal about us; learning processes in IT security; and digital forgetting. Each of these topics was investigated by a team of two doctoral researchers, one from the humanities and one from a technical field. These tandems were advised by industry partners to ensure that the team's work applies to society more broadly.

Website

Publisher of Well-Known Journals

Ruhr University Bochum has established itself as a publisher of significant journals in the field of IT security, providing an outstanding platform for groundbreaking research. These journals include

the IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES) and
the IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology (ToSC).

More Information