Dr. Simon Rohlmann, who has held a research and teaching professorship (Tandem-Professur) for IT Security/Information Security at the School of Business since the 2023 summer semester, was awarded the IT Security Doctoral Award for his outstanding dissertation entitled "On the Security of Signatures in Digital Documents" on April 10th in Worms. The award is endowed with 3000 Euro. His work was honored by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST e.V.) and the IT Security Department of the German Informatics Society (GI).
In his dissertation, Dr. Rohlmann identified significant security vulnerabilities in the signatures of the common document formats PDF, ODF, and OOXML. Using numerous attack scenarios, he demonstrated how these vulnerabilities can be exploited for the automated execution of malicious code and how the content of signed documents can be manipulated without compromising the signature. His doctoral research led to the identification of 15 CVE entries and influenced modifications to renowned document viewers, which contributed significantly to improving the security of these document formats.
Dr. Rohlmann completed his doctorate at the School of Computer Science on July 6, 2023 with the top grade of summa cum laude. His advisors were 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).