Out of a total of 48 submissions, eight teams made it to the final selection. Their concepts demonstrate the innovative potential of German cybersecurity research and make an important contribution to IT security and digital sovereignty. An independent jury of experts will now decide which three projects will receive awards.
The finalists for the 2026 German IT Security Award:
- Fault Injection-based Fuzzing: Automatically Testing Complex Systems
Submitting team: Nils Bars, Moritz Schloegel, Thorsten Holz (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy)
- IT-Cyber Security by globally smallest Quantum Randon Number Generator (QRNG)
Submitting team: Julia Kölbel, Dr. Thomas Rotter, Fabian Finkeldey, Andreas Nebeling, Marc Fischer, Dr. Bernd Burchard (Elmos Semiconductor SE)
- Privatemode AI: Cloud-based AI with Verifiable Confidentiality
Submitting Team: Dr. Felix Schuster, Thomas Tendyck, Dr. Marko Rosenmüller, Moritz Eckert (Edgeless Systems GmbH)
- Project Foxhound
Submitting team: David Klein (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy), Thomas Barber (SAP SE), Martin Johns (Technical University of Braunschweig)
- StorFuzz: Diversifying Automated Software Testing for Comprehensive Vulnerability Discovery
Submitting team: Leon Weiß, Tobias Holl, Kevin Borgolte (Ruhr University Bochum)
- Trustpoint – The open-source platform for managing digital machine identities in OT environments
Submitting team: Florian Handke, Alexander Harig (Campus Schwarzwald gGmbH), Jan Pelzl, Christian Schwinne (Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences), Dominik Isaak, Gavin Vaz (achelos GmbH), Rohit Bohara (asvin GmbH)
- VISSBOX: Hardware-Enforced Endpoint Isolation
Submitting team: Maximilian von Lonski, David Paul Agius, Andrea Wilkens, Anas Mohammed Ali, Patrick Herholz (VISS GmbH)
- zkBridge: Anonymous Credentials on Legacy Devices
Submitting team: Anja Lehmann, Andrea Flamini, Christian Mouchet, Andrey Sidorenko, Alexandros Zacharakis (Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam), Patrick Amrein, Alexey Lebedenko, Christopher Meier (Ubique)
The winners will be announced on November 5, 2026, in Bochum. The awards ceremony will take place as part of the 4th Cybersecurity Innovation Conference. In addition to the presentation of the nominated teams, guests can look forward to a program featuring keynote speeches, panel discussions, and opportunities for exchange among academia, industry, and politics.
The Horst Görtz Foundation has been awarding the German IT Security Prize every two years since 2006. The three best concepts will receive prize money totaling 130,000 euros, with 100,000 euros going to the first-place winner.
For more information on the nominees and the event: www.deutscher-it-sicherheitspreis.de
The awards ceremony is organized by the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr University on behalf of the Horst Görtz Foundation — in cooperation with Bitkom e. V. and the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE in Darmstadt.
General note: In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.
