This year’s winners of the IT Security Award have been chosen. The 100,000 euro award goes to the concept “Simply Secure: A Toolbox for the Automated Creation of Protected Hardware”. The jury awarded second prize of 40,000 euros to the project “Morphing Attack Detection (MAD)” in Bochum this evening, and third place and 20,000 euros to “Carbyne Stack – An Open Source Secure Multiparty Computation Cloud Platform”. In the run-up to the award ceremony, the 2nd Cybersecurity Innovation Conference of the digital association Bitkom took place in cooperation with Fraunhofer SIT, ATHENE and the Ruhr University Bochum, Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security. “Cyber security is a central challenge for the success of digitalisation. In Germany, we have an active and internationally outstanding research landscape that can make an important contribution to protecting us from the current cyber threats,” says Susanne Dehmel, member of the Bitkom Executive Board. “With the Cybersecurity Innovation Conference, we want to intensify the exchange between industry and research and support the highly innovative young scientific IT talent in Germany.”

The German IT Security Award has been presented by the Horst Görtz Foundation since 2006 and is one of the most prestigious awards in the industry. It is intended to promote IT security concepts and solutions “Made in Germany”.

Among the award winners:
1st prize: “Simply Secure: A Toolbox for the Automated Creation of Protected Hardware”: The tools support developers in the design of secure hardware circuits and enable both fully automated protection of insecure circuits against side-channel attacks and efficient testing of the side-channel resistance of any circuits. Thus, critical circuits can be reliably secured even by inexperienced developers. (David Knichel, Amir Moradi, Nicolai Müller and Pascal Sasdrich)
2nd prize “Morphing Attack Detection (MAD)”: Morphing attacks threaten the function of the passport as a document for identity control. The authors have developed a detection method for such attacks. Since a relevant number of morphing passports are already in circulation, the use of Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) software at the borders becomes urgent. MAD is implemented by combining features from textures, noise patterns or geometries in a light image. (Christoph Busch, Christian Rathgeb, Ulrich Scherhag, Daniel Fischer, Siri Lorenz and Juan Tapia)
3rd prize “Carbyne Stack – An Open Source Secure Multiparty Computation Cloud Platform”: Carbyne Stack is an open source platform built on cloud-native technologies for storing and processing encrypted data via Secure Multiparty Computation. As a generic, scalable, fail-safe solution developed according to modern software engineering methods, Carbyne Stack opens up secure multiparty computation for use in companies. (by Sven Trieflinger, Sebastian Becker, Vadim Raskin, Volker Suschke, Vincent Rieder, Jared Weinfurtner and Hanna Modica)