Dr.-Ing. Wojciech Ozga honored with innovation award

For his dissertation on "Hardening High-Assurance Security Systems with Trusted Computing", Dr.-Ing. Wojciech Ozga received the Innovation Award of the Industrieclub Sachsen on November 7, 2023 at Schloss Eckberg the Innovation Award of the Industrieclub Sachsen e.V. at Eckberg Castle.

Mr. Ozga's research work is localized in the field of Confidential Computing. The focus is on encrypted computing: A program and its data are encrypted not only during transmission or storage in file systems, but also in the main memory. This allows the use of clouds without the cloud provider being able to recognize the data, the code or the key material.

His work aims to use various approaches to prevent side-channel attacks that attempt to determine the plaintext of encrypted data. The doctoral thesis solves an important and currently very relevant social problem: we need to protect our critical infrastructures from attacks on their computer systems. The work has a high potential for innovation, and part of it is currently being adapted for practical use in the context of eHealth applications by a start-up in Dresden.

Dr. Wojciech Ozga has already been awarded the Commerzbank Prize for his dissertation this year. He completed his Master's degree in computer science at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Poland in 2014. From October 2017 to July 2020, he worked as a research assistant in the faculty's Systems Engineering Group. Dr. Ozga then moved to the security department of the IBM Research Zurich Lab, where he now works as a research associate.

Every year, the Industrieclub Sachsen e.V. and the TU Dresden award the Innovation Prize of the Industrieclub Sachsen e.V. to outstanding dissertations by young scientists at the Technische Universität Dresden, which are characterized by the particular practical relevance of their innovative content. The prize is endowed with 5,00 €.