I am a professor of information security and computer networks at Hochschule Worms, where I am also the scientific director of the Center for Technology and Transfer. In addition, I am a lecturer at the University of Hagen. Before my professorship, I was a PostDoc at Fraunhofer FKIE in Bonn, where I led a research team on smart building security. I received my Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) and my Habilitation (Dr. habil.) from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Hagen in 2013 and 2020, respectively.

A list of my 170+ mostly academic publications can be found here. However, I also wrote non-academic books about the Linux operating system and contributed open source code/patches to the free software community. There is also a list of selected talks that I gave.

Research interests

• CPS/IoT/smart building communications and security
• Application of machine learning/AI for anomaly detection in networks and networked CPS
• Network information hiding (network covert channels and network steganography)
• Security of communication protocols
• Terminology/taxonomy in information security
• Scientometrics

I am a member of several steering committees, initiatives, program and organizing committees (cf. details. I am (or was) lecturing and supervising at Bonn University, FernUniversität in Hagen and Hochschule Augsburg. A list of my projects, both funded and spare-time software projects, is also available.

In addition to information security, I am interested in university history, campus novels, and retro computing – in particular: operating system history and historic network protocols. I own a small collection of rather historic books on these retro computing topics. Sparetime: different kinds of sports.

Academic Profiles: Google Scholar, DBLP, ORCID, ResearchGate, Mastodon: @cdpxe@dju.social.

Contact: steffen (at) wendzel (dot) de (PGP pub key: FD701BD1).

Recent News

2023-Feb-13

• Today, I gave my inaugural lecture at the University of Hagen.
• In April, I will give another talk on Censorship Circumvention, Steganography and Traffic Obfuscation at the Cyberagentur, Halle.

2023-Feb-05

• New article Weaknesses of popular and recent covert channel detection methods and a remedy by S. Zillien and me was published by IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC).

2023-Jan-07

• Our new article Avoiding research tribal wars using taxonomies was just published in IEEE Computer Vol. 56(1).

2022-Dec-23

• Our latest work’s pre-print on a new category of covert channels called history covert channels is now available arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11850.

2022-Dec-04

• Last week, I was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies (IMATI), Genova, to work jointly with my long-time colleague Luca Caviglione.

2022-Nov-21

• We recently had a great kick-off for our KIASH project.

• I gave a talk about writing a Linux book for twenty years at the Linux Presentation Day 2022/2 at Hochschule Worms. The talk was covering the history of our German Linux book. Its history dates back till 2002 (first edition appeared 2004).

2022-Nov-12

• I now operate a Mastodon profile (@cdpxe@dju.social).

• I am very pleased that our new BMBF-funded project EMPOWER received funding for five years (2023-2027). We will run a sub-project on cyber security, funded with around 2.4 Mio. EUR! The project is mostly having a regional focus (Rhine-Main-Neckar area in RLP and connected states). Under the umbrella of this project, we will build a cyber security innovation lab, a think tank, and run several sub-projects, also to empower regional SMEs. Let us know if you are interested in collaborating with us.

2022-Oct-17

• Our new paper Anomaly Detection for Industrial Control Systems Through Totally Integrated Automation Portal Project History appeared in JoWUA.

2022-Oct-04

• We reworked the website on hiding patterns: https://patterns.ztt.hs-worms.de.

2022-Sep-30

• Our new special issue for the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) targets Cybersecurity Risks from a Multidisciplinary Perspective (Call for Papers). Looking forward for your submissions!
• There is some news about our steganography taxonomy work and my keynote related to it (in German).

2022-Aug-20

• Next week, I will give a keynote about hiding patterns in steganography at the CUING workshop (ARES conference, Vienna).
• Our PhD student Tobias Schmidbauer will present our paper Challenging Channels: Encrypted Covert Channels within Challenge-Response Authentication, also at the CUING workshop.

2022-Jul-13

• Our new BMBF-funded project is about to start: KIASH will investigate privacy-preserving AI-based anomaly detection for smart homes. The project will be conducted from 2022 till 2025.
• During the last year, we revised the 2021-taxonomy for steganography methods and heavily extended the previous taxonomy. More information can be found on the steganography hiding patterns website and in the pre-print.
• I am honored to serve as the program co-chair of the European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference 2023 (EICC’23), 2023, Stavanger, Norway. I hope the conference can take place in person.

2022-Jun-14

• I am honored to give the keynote at this year’s CUING workshop.

2022-Jun-10

• Our paper Challenging Channels: Encrypted Covert Channels within Challenge-Response Authentication was accepted at the CUING workshop co-located with the ARES conference in Vienna and will be presented in August.

2022-May-31

• Our AsiaCCS SoK paper on indirect network covert channels is now available for download.
• It looks like my group receives two new BMBF-funded security projects this summer. Stay tuned!