In June, you attended your first meeting on CISPA's supervisory board. You have known the center since 2017, when you chaired the commission that decided on CISPA's admission to the Helmholtz Association. How have you perceived the center’s development since then?
For me as a physicist, the structure of an atomic lattice comes to my mind. In a lattice, each atom occupies a well-defined place. Now, if you try to insert a new atom into this lattice, the surrounding atoms experience forces and the lattice changes. The new particle creates its environment and it takes some time for the lattice to transition to a new, energetically optimal state. That's kind of what happened with CISPA.
In the founding phase, there were of course different positions on CISPA, because the center was entering an established community, the Helmholtz Association. But it was possible to define the conditions at the beginning in such a way that CISPA could find an interstitial position in the lattice. In the past few years, it has been CISPA's task to find its proper place in the atomic lattice. I believe it has succeeded in doing so.
Seen from a distance, CISPA’s development has been admirable: Rapidly building up staff without compromising on its high standards of scientific qualification; establishing an administration that supports the researchers’ work; providing the necessary premises. At the same time, its ERC grants and top-class publications demonstrate the center’s scientific excellence. I can only congratulate all those involved in this success, first and foremost Professor Backes.
In your eyes, what is the mission that CISPA fulfills in society?
Today we live in a world where attackers and defenders are racing each other in the field of cybercrime. The question is, who is faster in identifying vulnerabilities: the defenders, in eliminating them, or the attackers, in exploiting them. That is today’s game as I understand it. But I dream of a world where software systems are securely based on mathematical proofs and no longer have security-related vulnerabilities. CISPA is called upon to make a very decisive contribution here.
"I dream of a world where software systems are securely based on mathematical proofs and no longer have security-related vulnerabilities. CISPA is called upon to make a very decisive contribution here."
At Robert Bosch GmbH, you were deputy chairman of the board of management as well as limited partner of the Robert Bosch Industrie Treuhand. You were responsible, among other things, for the corporate sector Research and Advance Engineering. You know a thing or two about the interface between business and research. In your eyes, what is the economic relevance of CISPA research?
First, a preliminary remark. Research and advanced development in a company is geared toward economic success. The challenge lies in asking the questions whose timely answers will determine the company’s success in five or ten years. It is about achieving competitive advantages through insights, as many insights as possible per euro invested. This brief characterization shows that - apart from financing, which is different for CISPA than a company - there definitely are parallels. Only the results do not serve a single company, but society as a whole.
What are the challenges that our society will face in five or ten years? That is the big question. In a world where people and value chains across the globe are interconnected, it is important to protect the personal and property rights of all entities. This brings us straight to CISPA and its research areas. The research areas that CISPA is dedicated to go to the heart of these challenges. And the economic potential is huge. Globally, cybercrime causes about $1 trillion in damage per year. This is about 1 percent of the global GDP. That's a huge amount of money. The economic potential that can be unlocked through successful work at CISPA is almost infinite.
"The economic potential that can be unlocked through successful work at CISPA is almost infinite."
CISPA understands itself as a training ground for the next generation of cybersecurity experts. You have a doctorate degree in physics and spent many years in the senate of high-level research institutions. What in your view is the social significance of promoting young scientists?
Universities and research institutions provide fertile ground for young scientists, without whom the economy cannot function. And there can be no prosperity without a successful economy. I think these two really are interdependent.
I would like to point out an aspect that is important to me. In addition to quantity, quality is of great importance. In my professional life, I have witnessed several times that small teams of brilliant people, who often came from different schools of thought, were much more efficient than large teams. There was one extreme example of this where a team of 15 people won against 500 developers. The developers adhered to their traditional development approach while the others tried to understand the underlying principles of the problem and turn it into something completely different. If CISPA also sees itself as a training ground for brilliant, outstanding minds, then a great goal has been achieved.
"Universities and research institutions provide fertile ground for young scientists, without whom the economy cannot function."
In 2008, you received the Technology Prize of the Eduard Rhein Foundation for the invention of CAN Bus. Together with a few colleagues at Robert Bosch GmbH, you had developed the system in the 1980s. What can you tell us about it?
It was not at all the goal of our group to develop a bus system. We had actually set out to work on a higher-level optimization of the car system. This required the interlinking of the electronic control units. Since there was no bus system that met our requirements, we developed the CAN bus as a side product so to say.
With the CAN bus, we united in one serial bus a number of features that were considered incompatible in the technical community at the time. We had also set ourselves quantitative goals: The bus should have a residual error probability that was at least 10,000 times lower than previously discussed solutions – and this in a car, which is an environment strongly disturbed by electromagnetic impulses –, it should not burden the processor on which the application software runs with bus management tasks, and the costs should be only one tenth of previous solutions.
Obviously, we achieved our goal. The CAN bus has been used in a wide variety of fields. By now, there are several billion integrated circuits worldwide that have been manufactured with CAN controllers.
That sounds like an extraordinary team effort. What made your team special?
What was our strength? We were a small team and competed against competitor teams that were at least 10 to 20 times larger. But they didn't stand a chance. We were five people trained in physics, electrical engineering and software development, and we just talked things through until we thought: “Now we've got it.” In the beginning, we had such a hard time with each other because we didn't understand each other's language. Until we understood that what the physicist calls one thing, the electrical engineer calls something else. I think these disputes created an unusually stringent intellectual discipline. Of course, there were always problems: There is hardly any project without a deep bump in the road, and they usually occur on Friday afternoons. But we were so excited about our project that we kept brainstorming at 9 p.m. at night until we thought: “This can be solved.” Without fun and dedication, no success.
"We were so excited about our project that we kept brainstorming at 9 p.m. at night until we thought: 'This can be solved.' Without fun and dedication, no success."
As a member of CISPA’s supervisory board, you are also taking on a certain amount of responsibility. What prompted you to do this and what are you most looking forward to in your new role?
What I'm looking forward to, of course, is the subject matter itself. Cybersecurity and trustworthy artificial intelligence are topics of the highest relevance for society and for businesses. If, in accompanying CISPA, I can make a small contribution, I am pleased. And learning more about these topics is certainly something that I will enjoy.
Also, for me things are now coming full circle. It must have been in 2013 that I met the then Federal Minister for Research, Professor Wanka, at the Hannover Messe. After a brief conversation, she asked what the big research topics were from my point of view. Spontaneously I said, "cybersecurity." The state secretary accompanying her responded, "Nobody cares about cybersecurity." Me: "That's not true." Him: "You may be interested in it, but nobody else is." And that was the end of this conversation on cybersecurity and nothing happened for a long time. In this respect, things have now come full circle, because I was involved in the commission that discussed the admission of CISPA to the Helmholtz Association, and I am now involved as a member of the supervisory board.
"Cybersecurity and trustworthy artificial intelligence are topics of the highest relevance for society and for businesses."
Is there a particular contribution that you would like to make to the CISPA supervisory board – anything that is particularly close to your heart?
I am not joining with a set agenda or goal in mind. I have resolved to try to understand the CISPA organism as best I can with open eyes and open ears. And then, if I feel I can make a contribution, I will. But for now, I'll let it come to me.
There is one thing that I will pay attention to: One observation I made in previous honorary positions at research organizations is that there is a demand for justification on paper which leads to hundreds of pages that researchers have to write for their funders every year. I have always found it very unfortunate in terms of research capacity that sometimes petty regulations slow down the researcher's drive. If we could reduce this to 20-30 pages per year, focusing on the research results that have actually been derived, that would be a real gain. One should not take the fun out of research.
