Commerzbank Prize for Dr.-Ing. Wojciech Ozga

For his dissertation on the topic of "Hardening High-Assurance Security Systems with Trusted Computing", Dr. Wojciech Ozga was awarded the dissertation prize by Commerzbank's Dresden Cultural Foundation, which recognizes outstanding dissertations by young scientists at TU Dresden.

With his work, Dr. Wojciech Ozga solves an important and currently very relevant social problem: Critical infrastructures must be protected against attacks - especially human attackers - on their computer systems. Vulnerabilities in systems can be exploited not only to access confidential data, but also to modify data or gain control of critical systems.

Wojciech Ozga's dissertation examines a multi-layered defense mechanism to protect an application service. This service is executed within a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment): the programs are encrypted during execution so that only the program itself recognizes the unencrypted code and the unencrypted data. The multi-layered approach is intended to ensure that TEE offers sufficient protection against all possible attacks under all circumstances: an outer layer protects the inner layers.
For example, a TEE could have insufficient protection against side-channel attacks. This could be ensured by only allowing applications that are on a specific permission list to run in the same virtual machine or on the same host.

Dr.-Ing. Wojciech received his Master's degree in Computer Science from AGH University of Science and Technology in Poland in 2014. From October 2017 to July 2020, he worked as a research assistant in the Systems Engineering Group of the faculty. Since then, he has been working as a research associate in the security department of IBM Research Zurich Lab.