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Prof. Dr. Ghassan Karame

 

Information Security

Professor / Head of Chair

Address:
Ruhr-University Bochum
Faculty of Computer Science
Information Security
Universitätsstr. 150
D-44801 Bochum

Room: MC 1.56

Telephone: (+49) (0) 234 32 – 19601

Office Hours: By arrangement

E-Mail: ghassan.karame@rub.de

About me

Since November 2021, I am a full Professor of Computer Science at the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) – leading the Chair for Information Security. I am part of the Cluster of Excellence CASA (Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries) and a member of the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security (HGI). I am also involved as a (part-time) Chief Scientific Advisor at NEC Laboratories Europe. Before joining RUB, I was working as an NEC Fellow and was leading the Security research group at NEC Labs in Germany.  An outdated summary of my research at NEC Labs is highlighted in this interview. Prior to joining NEC Labs, I was working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Information Security of ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since 2011, I hold a PhD degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. You can find more information about me here.

Research

Research priorities of the Chair include, but are not limited to, research in the areas of blockchain security and privacy, platform and storage security, and machine learning security, namely:
  • Blockchain security and privacy: we explore how to improve the security and privacy of cryptocurrencies and modern blockchain platforms while enhancing their performance and scalability.
  • Platform security: we explore how to make use of hardware support to improve the security and privacy of platforms.

Teaching

Open Positions

The Chair for Information Security at the Ruhr-University Bochum has multiple open positions for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the area of system & information security, particularly (but not limited to) those specializing in:

  • Blockchain security and privacy: we explore how to improve the security and privacy of modern blockchain platforms while enhancing their performance and scalability.
  • Platform/Storage security: we explore how to make use of hardware support to improve the security and privacy of platforms.


Do you have a solid background in blockchain technologies, or security/privacy concepts? Are you excited about building highly performant secure systems? If so, I’d like to hear from you.

If you are interested in applying, please send me an email with your current CV and a description of why you think you are a good fit.

Selected Recent Activities

For a full list of my activities, please click here.

  • PC Member of AFT 2023
  • PC Member of IEEE S&P 2024
  • PC Member of NDSS 2024
  • PC Member of ACM SIGMOD 2024
  • Track Chair at ACM CCS 2023 (blockchain and distributed systems track)
  • PC Member of WWW 2023
  • PC Member of ACM ASIACCS 2017, 2022, 2023
  • PC Member of PETS 2021, 2022, 2023
  • PC Member of IEEE DSN 2021, 2022
  • PC Member of  ESORICS 2019,2020, 2021, 2022
  • PC Member of FC 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
  • PC Member of ACNS 2020, 2021
  • Associate Editor of IEEE TDSC (2020 – Present)
  • Associate Editor of IEEE T-IFS (2020 – Present)
  • PC Chair of ACM CCSW 2017
  • Guest Editor of IEEE Security & Privacy, Special Issue on Blockchain security and privacy

Awards & Recognition

Selected Recent Talks

For a full list of my talk, please click here.

  • Securing Blockchains with TEEs, EURECOM, Nice, France, November 2022 (Invited talk)
  • Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchain Technologies, International Workshop on Blockchain and Cloud Computing, co-located with AsiaCCS 2021 (Virtual), June 2021 (Keynote talk)
  • Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchains, TU Delft Blockchain Symposium, March 2021, (Keynote talk)
  • Blockchain Security – Experience with PoW Blockchains, Dagstuhl Seminar 19451 „Biggest Failures in Security“, Dagstuhl, Germany, November 2019
  • Blockchain Networks, IMDEA Networks Annual Workshop, May 2019, Madrid, Spain (Invited talk)
  • Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchain Technologies, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, April 2019 (Invited talk)

Selected Publications

For a full list of my publications, please click here.

  • Michael Rodler, David Paassen, Wenting Li, Lukas Bernhard, Thorsten Holz, Ghassan Karame, Lucas Davi
    EF/CF: A High Performance Fuzzer for Ethereum Smart Contracts
    In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2023 [Preprint | Bibtex] (to appear)
  • Sebastien Andreina, Lorenzo Alluminio, Giorgia Marson, Ghassan Karame
    Estimating Block Propagation Times across Blockchain Forks (short paper)
    In Proceedings of Financial  Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2023 [Preprint | Bibtex] (to appear)
  • Jiang Jianyu, Claudio Soriente, Ghassan Karame
    On the Challenges of Detecting Side-Channel Attacks in SGX
    In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusion and Defenses (RAID), 2022 [Preprint | Bibtex] 
  • Karl Wüst, Loris Diana, Kari Kostiainen, Ghassan Karame, Sinisa Matetic, Srdjan Capkun
    Bitcontracts: Adding Expressive Smart Contracts to Legacy Cryptocurrencies
    In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS), 2021 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Michael Rodler, Wenting Li, Ghassan Karame, Lucas Davi
    EVMPatch: Timely and Automated Patching of Ethereum Smart Contracts
    In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2021 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Jian Liu, Wenting Li, Ghassan Karame, N. Asokan
    Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-assisted Secret Sharing
    In IEEE Transaction on Computers (IEEE TC), 2019 [Preprint | Bibtex]. Won 2019 best paper award at IEEE Transactions on Computers!
  • Claudio Soriente, Ghassan Karame, Wenting Li, Sergey Fedorov
    ReplicaTEE: Enabling Seamless Replication of SGX-Enclaves in the Cloud
    In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2019 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Michael Rodler, Wenting Li, Ghassan Karame, Lucas Davi
    Sereum: Protecting Existing Smart Contracts Against Re-Entrancy Attacks
    In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS) [Preprint | Bibtex] 2019.
    Related media reports: [NEC].
  • Sinisa Matetic, Karl Wuest, Moritz Schneider, Kari Kosiainen, Ghassan Karame, Srdjan Capkun
    BITE: Bitcoin Lightweight Client Privacy using Trusted Execution
    In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security),  2019,[Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Arthur Gervais, Ghassan Karame, K. Wuest, V. Glykantzis, Hubert, Ritzdorf, Srdjan Capkun
    On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchain
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), [Preprint | Bibtex], 2016. Measured as one of the normalized top 100 security papers!
  • Frederik Armknecht, Ludovic Barman, Jens-Matthias Bohli, Ghassan Karame
    Mirror: Enabling Proofs of Data Replication and Retrievability in the Cloud
    In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), [Preprint | Bibtex], 2016
  • Ghassan Karame and Elli Androulaki
    Bitcoin and Blockchain Security
    Artech House, ISSBN 9781630810139, 240 pages, 2016 [Bibtex]
  • Frederik Armknecht, Jens-Matthias Bohli, Ghassan Karame, Franck Youssef
    Transparent Data Deduplication in the Cloud
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), 2015 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Arthur Gervais, Hubert Ritzdorf, Ghassan Karame, Srdjan Capkun
    Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS),  2015 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Frederik Armknecht, Jens-Matthias Bohli, Ghassan Karame, Zongren Liu, Christian Reuter
    Outsourced Proofs of Retrievability
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), 2014 [Preprint | Bibtex].
  • Dan Dobre, Ghassan Karame, Wenting Li, Matthias Majuntke, Neeraj Suri, Marko Vukolic
    PoWerStore: Proofs of Writing for Efficient and Robust Storage
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS),  [Preprint | Bibtex].
    Related technical report: CoRR abs/1212.3555, 2012.
  • Ghassan Karame, Elli Androulaki, Srdjan Capkun
    Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), 2012, [Preprint | Bibtex].
    Related technical report: Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2012/248, 2012.
    Related media reports: ETH Globe, September 2012, „Keine versteckten Zahlungen“ ETH Life, September 2012, „Better security for the internet currency Bitcoin“
  • Ghassan Karame, Aurelien Francillon, Srdjan Capkun
    Pay as you Browse: Microcomputations as Micropayments in Web-based Services
    In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2011, [Preprint | Bibtex].