News

Join us for the fourth annual High-Tech Women Event (HTW’25) on September 4, 2025, in Darmstadt, Germany. This dynamic event provides a unique platform for accomplished women worldwide in technology and science to share their professional experiences and groundbreaking ideas

Successful PhD Defense: Phillip Rieger Completes PhD on Adversarially Robust Machine Learning

On May 14, 2025, Phillip Rieger successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Training AI in Hostile Environments: Adversarially Robust Machine Learning”. Phillip has been an integral part of the System Security Lab since 2019, initially joining as a student assistant. In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped academic life, he began his PhD journey. Notably, he was the lab’s first pure AI-focused PhD student and helped establish the group’s AI research direction. Over the past five years, Phillip has significantly contributed to the lab’s research on Federated Learning (FL), developing robust defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks in distributed machine learning. His dissertation addresses key challenges in securing machine learning under adversarial conditions, introducing novel techniques to make FL systems resilient to poisoning and backdoor attacks, adaptive anomaly detection systems for IoT environments, and new defense strategies for split learning setups. Over the course of his PhD, Phillip published an impressive 19 papers, including 12 at Core A* conferences, and received two distinguished paper awards for his work on DeepFake detection and mitigating backdoor attacks in Split Learning. Beyond publications, he has led several workshops on FL and shared his expertise through a dedicated lecture series at TU Darmstadt on FL. Congratulations, Phillip, on this outstanding achievement, and all the best for your future!

Happy to be part of the Munich Satellite Navigation Summit 2025 which took place in the magnificent setting of the Munich Residenz

We are excited to highlight one of the standout presentations from Lyon, France in 2025: “HFL: Hardware Fuzzing Loop with Reinforcement Learning”, presented by Lichao Wu from TU Darmstadt – System Security Lab.

HackTheSilicon is the world's largest Hardware Security Competition.

The exciting award ceremony of HackTheSilicon @ DATE’25, held in Lyon, France as part of the prestigious DATE’25 conference.

This morning, we successfully concluded the HackTheSilicon session at DATE'25, hosted in Rhône 4. Hosted by DATE 25 and organized by HackTheSilicon Team at TU Darmstadt -System Security Lab, Germany, Texas A&M University, USA, and Intel. The last 48-hour HACK@DATE'25 competition, which started in December 2024, was a high-intensity session.

Today, we’re excited to share an exclusive look behind the scenes at the System Security Lab – with Kavita Kumari, our talented Postdoc and AI Team Lead.

Our team had the pleasure of actively contributing to the event Secure AI for Health Defense, and Beyond that took place at UC San Diego, on February 19, 2025.

Exchange on cybersecurity from AI to satellite research

On January 24, 2025, Professor of Informatics Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi welcomed the U.S. Consul General in Frankfurt, Brian Heath, and his delegation for a visit to the System Security Lab. The discussions focused on current developments in IT security, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to satellite research.