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Research AT CISPA

Cybersecurity is a young and rapidly evolving field. As a Helmholtz Center dedicated to information security, we combine cutting-edge foundational research with innovative application-oriented research in the areas of cybersecurity, privacy, and trustworthy artificial intelligence.

FOR RESEARCHERS

CISPA offers an open, inclusive, and international research environment. Our working language is English and we provide hands-on support with relocation and integration for our international colleagues. Researchers benefit from our excellent infrastructure and services relating to third-party funding, data management and publications. We support the families of our researchers offering, for example, local childcare guidance as well as a dual career service. At CISPA, a vibrant community and six closely connected research areas foster collaboration and networking across disciplines.

FOR EVERYONE

Cybersecurity is a closed book? It doesn’t have to be. We break down our research, show how it applies to everyday life, and make complex topics easier to understand. Check out our print publications, listen to our podcast episodes, or watch videos that highlight our research and values here at CISPA.

OUR RESEARCH IN NUMBERS

SOME ACHIEVEMENTS1

1.030

Conference papers in total

528

Of which A* 

292

Papers at the top 6 venues of security, privacy & cryptography alone

12018–2024

WHAT OUR FACULTY SAY

Security research in today’s interconnected world has so many different challenges. I am particularly excited about making complex security and privacy mechanisms more human-friendly.

Dr. Katharina Krombholz
Faculty

We are trying to determine ways to ascertain that current and future systems are secure. To achieve this, we develop analysis frameworks, methodologies, and tools. These enable us to identify attacks and propose more secure solutions.

Prof. Dr. Cas Cremers
Faculty

My group researches novel classes of vulnerabilities in Web applications and builds tools to detect and mitigate them. In addition, we investigate how to best notify affected sites about the vulnerabilities we found. This way, our insights do not only serve us, but can help administrators close their security holes, impacting the overall security of the Web.

Dr. Ben Stock
Faculty

Mobile devices can pose severe privacy threats but at the same time offer with their particular setting great opportunities to create more secure systems that put the users back into control over their data. In our research, we take this opportunity and improve mobile system security from hardware primitives to middleware design to the user's central role in the data protection.

Dr. Sven Bugiel
Faculty

Our research explores the boundaries of what is possible in secure computation: What are the strongest possible security guarantees and strongest functionality we can achieve under the weakest possible assumptions?

Dr. Nico Döttling
Faculty

I see Cyber-Physical Systems as the new frontier of cybersecurity: my goal is to understand threats & defenses based on interactions between physical and digital systems, and to translate cybersecurity principles to engineered systems.

Dr. Nils Ole Tippenhauer
Faculty

Our society regularly faces devastating and largely anonymous cyber attacks. We explore automated, reliable, and accurate methods to identify the origin of cyber attacks -- an important step to hold anonymous attackers responsible for their action.

Prof. Dr. Christian Rossow
Faculty

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offer great benefits to industry and society in general. While we are advancing the state of the art of future intelligent systems, we equally seek compliance with our expectations on security, privacy and safety.

Prof. Dr. Mario Fritz
Faculty

OUR RESEARCH AREAS

We offer a world-class international research environment and are committed to the highest academic standards. Granting extensive resources to our researchers, CISPA is an attractive destination for the best scientific talent from all over the world. Currently, our research pivots around six research areas.


Algorithmic
Foundations &
Cryptography

 


Trustworthy
Information
Processing

 


Reliable
Security
Guarantees

 


Threat
Detection &
Defenses

 


Secure
Connected &
Mobile Systems

 


Empirical &
Behavioral
Security

 

PROJECTS AND COLLABORATIONS

The timeliness of CISPA's research activities is also reflected in a large number of externally funded projects in which our researchers address very specific questions of information security. CISPA maintains a network of excellent national and international partners, which forms the basis for interdisciplinary innovation projects.

 

CISPAS CURRENT INSTITUTIONAL UNIVERSITY COLLABORATIONS

AWARDS

OUR SCIENTIFIC PRIZES IN NUMBERS1

15

ERC GRANTS

25

awards for individual research contributions

3

long-term scientific impact awards

12018-2024

 

© ERC

©ERC

 

ERC GRANTS

CISPA researchers have already received numerous scientific prizes and awards. Among the most important of these are the 15 ERC Grants that our researchers have won to date. With these grants, the EU supports excellent scientists and their groundbreaking research.

© ERC

©ERC

 

ERC GRANTS

CISPA researchers have already received numerous scientific prizes and awards. Among the most important of these are the 15 ERC Grants that our researchers have won to date. With these grants, the EU supports excellent scientists and their groundbreaking research.


LATEST HIGHLIGHTS

ERC Consolidator Grant for CISPA-Faculty Dr. Sebastian Stich

CISPA researcher Andreas Zeller inducted into Academia Europaea

RESEARCH GROUPS

Across six closely connected research areas, CISPA researchers explore the future of information security and trustworthy artificial intelligence. From the mathematical foundations of cryptography and secure algorithms to privacy-preserving machine learning, from formal methods for verified systems to hardware-level security, and from securing connected devices to understanding human behavior in digital contexts — our more than 40 Faculty-led research groups work at the cutting edge of cybersecurity to make tomorrow’s digital world safer, smarter, and more trustworthy.

PUBLICATIONS

MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Year 2025

Conference / Medium

Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)

Conference / Medium

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Conference / Medium

IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)