Towards Resilient and Sustainable Software Security

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Holz, Universität Bochum

In parallel with the advancing digitalization, computer security has become an increasingly important and urgent challenge. In particular, the sound and robust implementation of complex software systems is still not well understood in practice, as evidenced by the steady stream of successful attacks in the wild. The current state of the art in soft- ware security consists of solutions that are often technically sound but do not provide operational security in practice. This talk will provide an overview of our work in recent years to build more robust and resilient software systems. We will also present some approaches on how to increase security in different application domains in the future. One focus of the talk will be on software testing, as this has been the main focus of my research group in recent years.

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Holz is a tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken, where he moved in October 2021. Before this position, Thorsten was a full professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Ruhr University Bochum. His research interests include technical aspects of secure systems, with a specific focus on systems security. Currently, his work concentrates on reverse engineering, automated vulnerability detection, and studying latest attack vectors. He received the Dipl.-Inform. degree in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen, Germany (2005) and the Ph.D. degree from University of Mannheim (2009). In 2011, he received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation (DFG), in 2014 an ERC Starting Grant, and in 2022 an ERC Consolidator Grant. Furthermore, he was a Co- Spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence „CASA – Cyber Security in the Age of Large- Scale Adversaries“ (with C. Paar and E. Kiltz) from 2019 to 2021.