I am a professor of information security and computer networks at Worms University of Applied Sciences (founder of the cyber security research group (CSRG) and deputy scientific head of the centre of technology and transfer) and also affiliated with Fraunhofer FKIE (where I was head of a security research team for three years). I received my Ph.D. from the Univ. of Hagen in 2013.Aged 17, I started writing books (sold 65,000 printed+electronic copies so far and counted 60,000+ free downloads of my older editions). A list of my 130+ publications can be found here. My publications appeared in high-quality journals/conference such as ACM CSUR, Comm. ACM, Elsevier FGCS, Wiley SCN, IEEE Security & Privacy, IEEE LCN, IFIP SEC, Springer ANTE and J.UCS. However, I also wrote books about the Linux operating system and contributed open source code/patches to the free software community. There is also a list of selected talks that I gave.
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):
- May-04-2019:
- I was interviewed by SmartRailWord for their series 5 minutes with ....
- Final Call for Papers: International Workshop on Information Security Methodology and Replication Studies (IWSMR 2019) to be held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2019), August 26 – August 29, 2019, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. Please consider submitting your paper(s).
- Apr-24-2019:
- There is a new news article from Communications of the ACM about some of the research I conduct as well as about the CUING initiative, cf. here.
- Apr-21-2019 and Apr-18-2019:
- We organize a new special issue on Information Security Methodology, Replication Studies and Information Security Education at the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), Impact factor: 1,066.
- My network security research group (NSRG) is now a cyber security research group (CSRG) with a broader focus and involvement of three new professors.
- Version 0.6.1 of CCEAP was released today.
- Mar-26-2019:
- Check out our new IEEE Security & Privacy special issue on digital forensics (part II).
- The eight edition of our German Linux book Einstieg in Linux was just published!
- Mar-22-2019:
- I am excited that we have a new research project called MADISA that performs ML-based anomaly detection for ICS. The idea is to evaluate the history of changes within the data stored on an ICS' components. Website (in German)
- Feb-28-2019:
- I am exited to announce our new International Workshop on Information Security Methodology and Replication Studies (IWSMR 2019) to be held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2019), August 26 – August 29, 2019, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. Please consider submitting your paper(s).
- Feb-17-2019:
- My co-author and me are finalizing the manuscript for the 8th edition of our Linux book (in German), it will appear in March.
- We are organizing a session on High Performance Mission Critical System Development at HiPMiC 2019 in Dublin. Please consider submitting your paper. The deadline is March-15th.
- Feb-08-2019:
- It seems I will invest some time in the coming months to complete my text adventure engine that I partially implemented in 2007 (script language plus compiler written in C; just the interpreter and some features for the script language are missing).
- Dec-19-2018:
- Our new paper has been accepted at Elsevier FGCS:
Wojciech Mazurczyk, Steffen Wendzel, Mehdi Chourib, Jörg Keller: Countering Adaptive Network Covert Communication with Dynamic Wardens, Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), Elsevier (in press).
Just e-mail me if you have no access to the paper. - Dec-17-2018:
- I am serving as a leading guest editor for an upcoming Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) special issue on Emerging Topics in Defending Networked Systems (Impact factor: 4.64!).
- Dec-08-2018:
- We organize a special issue on "Cyber-Physical Security in Industrial Environments" for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Internet (impact factor: 5.4!). The submission site is already open (just select our SI during the submission procedure).
- Nov-29-2018:
- Check out our new project WoDiCoF, which is a testbed for covert channel detection algorithms.
- Nov-22-2018:
- We are in the news:
- Computer.org: Hacker's latest weapon: Steganography, (2018-11-15)
- Gave a talk on countermeasure variation at CECC'18 last week in Ljubljana.
- Oct-11-2018:
- I am currently a featured reviewer (ACM Computing Reviews).
- Sep-13-2018:
- I received the printed editions of my new book. Here is a photo.
- Sep-12-2018:
- The slides of my lectures at the COINS PhD summer school 2018 are now online.
- Sep-11-2018:
- A new paper got accepted at NordSec'18:
Sebastian Zillien, Steffen Wendzel: Detection of covert channels in TCP retransmissions, in Proc. NordSec, Springer, 2018/in press.
I wrote a blog post on the topic that we are going to cover in this paper and another paper. - Aug-25-2018:
- I contributed a section to the new issue of the newsletter of the German Informatics Society (text in German), see here.
- Aug-24-2018:
- The online version of my new German book on TCP/IP and IoT network security is now available. The print version is still in press.
- Aug-15-2018:
- Das Cover zu meinem noch unveröffentlichen Buch ist da. Es erscheint in Kürze bei Springer-Vieweg.
- Aug-13-2018:
- A new paper has been accepted at CECC'18:
Steffen Wendzel, Daniela Eller, Wojciech Mazurczyk: One Countermeasure, Multiple Patterns: Countermeasure Variation for Covert Channels, in Proc. Central European Security Conference (CECC'18), to appear.
