Simon Rohlmann wins CAST/GI PhD award

Simon Rohlmann wins CAST/GI PhD award

For his outstanding dissertation “On the Security of Signatures in Digital Documents”, Dr. Simon Rohlmann was awarded the IT Security PhD award on April 10 in Worms by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST e.V.) and the IT Security Department of the German Informatics Society (GI).

In his work, Simon Rohlmann identified significant weaknesses in the security of signatures for the popular document formats PDF, ODF and OOXML. He demonstrated with numerous attacks that vulnerabilities could be exploited for the automated execution of malicious code and that the content of signed documents could be forged without invalidating the signature. The research conducted as part of the doctorate resulted in 15 CVE entries, led to product adaptations for well-known document viewers and thus made a significant contribution to improving the security of the named document formats.

Prize winner Dr. Simon Rohlmann (on the right) with Prof. Dr. Henning Kehr, Vice President of Worms University of Applied Sciences at the award ceremony
(Copyright: Daniel Bub and Sebastian Zillien)

Simon Rohlmann completed his doctorate with “Summa cum laude” at the Faculty of Computer Science on July 6, 2023. He was supervised by Prof. Dr. Jörg Schwenk (first supervisor, Chair of Network and Data Security), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Juraj Somorovsky (University of Paderborn) and Prof. Dr. Martin Johns (TU Braunschweig). Since April 2023, the award winner has been working as a tandem professor for IT Security/Information Security at Mainz University of Applied Sciences. Dr. Jan Richter-Brockmann, another doctoral graduate of the Faculty of Computer Science (Chair of Security Engineering), was also a finalist for the PhD award.