About me


Steffen WendzelI am a professor of information security and computer networks at Worms University of Applied Sciences and also affiliated with Fraunhofer FKIE (Bonn) and Cleopa (near Berlin). I received my Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Hagen. Aged 17, I started writing books (sold 60,000 printed+electronic copies so far and counted 40,000 free downloads of my older editions). A list of my 100+ publications can be found here. My publications were published in high-quality journals/conference such as ACM CSUR and CACM, Wiley SCN, IEEE Security & Privacy (journal), IEEE LCN, IFIP SEC, Springer ANTE and J.UCS. However, I wrote also books on the Linux operating system and contributed tons open source code/patches to the free software community. There is also a list of selected talks.

My research focuses on network information hiding (network covert channels and network steganography), science of security (SoC), IoT/smart buildings/homes, security of embedded communication protocols, and information security terminology/taxonomy.

Some of my key publications are on the fundamentals (SoC) of network information hiding: taxonomy/patterns/fundamentals [1,2], creativity evaluation of research paper submissions [3] and scientific methodology of information hiding [4]. Some of my other key contributions are focusing on traffic normalization and active wardens [5, 6] and covert channel optimization [7,8].

I am a member of several steering committees, initiatives, program and organizing committees (cf. details). I am (or was) lecturing and supervising at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, Bonn University and Hagen University. A list of my projects, both funded and spare-time software projects, is also available.

In addition to information security, I am interested in university history, campus novels, and retro computing – in particular: operating system history and historic network protocols. I own a small collection of rather historic books on these retro computing topics. Since about five years, I am also a mid-distance runner (5km to half-marathon).

Find (information about) me here: Twitter, Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Contact: steffen (at) wendzel (dot) de (PGP pub key: FD701BD1).

Recent News (Selection):

  • Jun-15-2018:
    • Our paper (W. Mazurczyk, S. Wendzel, K. Cabaj: Towards Deriving Insights into Data Hiding Methods Using Pattern-based Approach) got accepted at the CUING'18 workshop of ARES'18.
  • Jun-12-2018:
  • Apr-29-2018:
    • Our new paper on a distributed testbed for the evaluation of (parallel) covert channel detection algorithms got accepted at the Journal of Univeral Computer Science.
  • Apr-27-2018:
    • The SCN journal published our new special issue entitled "Emerging and Unconventional: New Attacks and Innovative Detection Techniques"
  • Apr-22-2018:
  • Apr-20-2018:
    • Finished working on the manuscript of my upcoming (German) book on network/IoT security.
  • Apr-17-2018:
    • I will contribute one or two lectures on my covert channel research to the COINS PhD summer school on Lesvos this year.
  • Apr-16-2018:
    • The slides of my Hack-in-the-Box talk [PDF, in English] and of my IoT Security talk on Fachtagung Gebäude 4.0 [PDF, in German] are available now.
  • Apr-09-2018:
    • Schwarz-auf-Weiss published my review (in German) of a book on surveillance entitled Komplizen des Erkennungsdienstes.
    • On Apr-11th, I will give a talk at the Tüv-Süd event on building automation in Munich. On Apr-12th, I will give a talk at HITB-AMS on steganography, especially about my research of recent years (see news entry below).
  • Feb-19-2018:
  • Dec-27-2017:
  • Dec-04-2017:
    • A new article of us got accepted at IEEE IT Professional magazine:
      Krzysztof Cabaj, Luca Caviglione, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Steffen Wendzel, Alan Woodward, Sebastian Zander: The New Threats of Information Hiding: the Road Ahead, IEEE IT Professional (in press).
  • Nov-30-2017:
    • The new special issue of IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine was just published, check out our introductory article here.
    • Also have a look at our overview article on what is going on in Digital Forensics, which you can find here (also published in IEEE SnP Magazine).
    • Today, the Smart Building Security workshop took place, which I organized at CAST e.V. in Darmstadt.
  • Nov-24-2017:
  • Nov-21-2017:
    • I wrote some piece about the smart home security update problematic (in German), which is now covered in several newspapers, such as Märkische Allgemeine, Hannoversche Allgemeine, Lübecker Nachrichten, and Göttinger Tageblatt, cf. here.
    • Last week, I did a video interview for our upcoming CACM article. It will be published in early January, I guess.
  • Nov-02-2017:
  • Oct-25-2017:
  • Oct-05-2017:
    • Two new papers got accepted at the Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility:

      (1) Steffen Wendzel, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Georg Haas: Steganography for Cyber-physical Systems, Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility (JCSM).

      (2) Gabriele Spenger, Jörg Keler, Steffen Wendzel: Enhanced Ant Colony-inspired Parallel Algorithm to Improve Cryptographic PRNGs, Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility (JCSM).
  • Sep-25-2017:
    • I will give a talk on IoT security at the GI SECMGT workshop 'Neue' Technologien und 'neue' Bedrohungen? in November.
    • A new paper on forensics by Wojciech Mazurczyk, Luca Caviglione and me got accepted at the IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine.
  • Sep-12-2017:
    • I wrote a review of the Cambridge Univ. Press book `Darkweb Cyber Threat Intelligence Mining', to appear soon in ACM Computing Reviews.
    • The agenda (in German) of the Smart Building Security workshop that I organize under the umbrella of CAST e.V. was published, cf. this link.
  • Sep-07-2017:
    • I will give a talk at the Bälz seminar about smart building security at the Technische Hochschule in Cologne tomorrow.
    • I am organizing a Smart Building Security workshop (in German) under the umbrella of CAST e.V., cf. this link.
    • I will present our work on inter-protocol steganography at 42th IEEE LCN in Singapore in October.
    • A new paper on Information Hiding was accepted at Communications of the ACM and will appear in the January 2018 issue.
  • Aug-03-2017:
    • Wrote a short piece on smart home security (in German) for PC Welt, cf. this link.
  • Jul-12-2017:
    • One paper (`Inter-protocol Steganography for Real-time Services and Its Detection Using Traffic Coloring Approach') was accepted at the 42th IEEE LCN.
    • A review that I wrote for ACM Computing Reviews was published in Vol. 58(1), p. 49, 2017.
  • Jun-23-2017:
  • Apr-19-2017:
    • A new interview with me for Fraunhofer myTalent was published today.
    • A new paper (open access) on Information Hiding and Science 2.0 was just published today.
    • I am now an editorial board member of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), which is open access since 1995.
    • I contributed an update to the OpenBSD pscan port that I maintain.
  • Apr-05-2017: New article of W. Mazurczyk and me has been accepted at Communications of the ACM


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