Fraunhofer CyberStar Award (FCSA) acknowledges outstanding scientific achievement of Israeli junior cybersecurity scientists at the German-Israeli Cyber Conference

The winners of the first Fraunhofer CyberStar Award (FCSA) were announced today: They are Eyal Ronen, Ph.D., from the Tel Aviv University and Anatoly Shusterman from the Ben-Gurion University. The Fraunhofer CyberStar Award promotes excellent graduates in applied cybersecurity and their thesis. The award ceremony took place as part of the first German-Israeli Cyber Conference and was held online. It was supported by high-level speakers from both Israel and Germany such as Yigal Unna, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Arne Schönbohm, the President of Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security, and other well-known cybersecurity experts. The conference was opened by Susanne Wasum-Rainer, the German Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and Jeremy Nissim Issacharoff, the Israeli Ambassador in Berlin. The conference was chaired by Haya Shulman.

Dr. Eyal Ronen received the Fraunhofer CyberStar Award for the best Ph.D.-thesis. His research dealt with the security of IoT devices. In his spectacular attack on the infrastructure of a building he flew a drone with a transmitter inside a building, accessed its lighting systems and had the office lights flash the SOS signal. His Ph.D. supervisor is Professor Adi Shamir, one of the inventors of the RSA encryption. Dr. Ronen is currently a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s School of Computer Science and is a member of the CheckPoint Institute for Information Security.

Anatoly Shusterman was awarded with the Fraunhofer CyberStar Award for the best master thesis. In his master thesis he described an attack that took advantage of a security leak in processor caches, enabling to fingerprint a user’s surfing behavior on the Internet – even when they were using anonymization or privacy protection settings such as private browser tabs, VPN or TOR. Anatoly is currently employed as a data scientist with the Intel Corporation and is working on his Ph.D.-thesis at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.

The Fraunhofer Cyber Star award was initiated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt as part of its goal to promote cooperation in the field of applied cybersecurity between Israel and Germany. The award consists of a cash price of 5,000 US-Dollars for the best Ph.D.-thesis and 1,000 US-Dollars for the best master thesis as well as speaking opportunities during the conference. Fraunhofer SIT and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem HUJI organized the German-Israeli Cyber Conference together in close cooperation with the Israeli Embassy in Germany, supported by the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE.

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Quote „The award acknowledges the outstanding achievements of junior scientists and creates a platform for them to present and discuss their findings with high-level security experts from businesses, science and the public sector“, stated Prof. Michael Waidner, head of Fraunhofer SIT and the German National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE.

Please find more information on the Fraunhofer CyberStar Award here: https://fraunhofer-cyberstar.org/