Sven Gebhard Wins 1st Prize in the CAST IT Security Competition
Sven Gebhard received the 1st Prize in the CAST IT Security Competition for his bachelor’s thesis, “Covert Exfiltration of Cryptographic Keys from Android Devices”, supervised by Christian Lindenmeier, Jonas Röckl, and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Felix Freiling. In his thesis, he demonstrated how covert communication channels can be used to stealthily retrieve ephemeral cryptographic keys from the Signal Messenger Android app. Based on the thesis, a new category of network covert channel, so-called key-extraction-based covert channels, was discovered and published at NordSec’24.