Top researchers from Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in Styria, Austria, will receive highly endowed Starting Grants from the European Research Council in 2022. The research of computer scientist and cybersecurity expert Daniel Gruss and experimental physicist and START Prize winner Marcus Ossiander will receive funding totaling 3.3 million euros over the next five years, the European Research Council announced today.

Of the 408 Starting Grants awarded across the EU, a total of 17 went to researchers from Austrian institutions. Austria is thus in 8th place, ahead of Sweden, Spain, and Denmark, for example. 

Horst Bischof, Vice-Rector for Research and future Rector of TU Graz from autumn 2023: “With Daniel Gruss and Marcus Ossiander, the ERC Starting Grants are not going to strangers, quite the contrary. Both are top researchers in their fields who have already made impressive achievements despite their young ages. Daniel Gruss regularly causes a stir in the world of cybersecurity; Marcus Ossiander is in the process of transferring from Harvard to TU Graz and in this interim phase alone has already acquired an Austrian Science Fund (FWF) START Prize and now the ERC Starting Grant. I extend my warmest congratulations to both of them. TU Graz is particularly proud of such top minds in research.”

Daniel Gruss: Foundations for sustainable security

Daniel Gruss studied computer science at TU Graz from 2008 and dealt early on with the unauthorized tapping of data in his dissertation. In 2018, he was a vital member of an international team of scientists who uncovered the serious hardware security vulnerabilities of Meltdown and Spectre in Intel processors. Since then, he has explored even more IT security vulnerabilities. Gruss holds a tenure track professorship at TU Graz and is a regular speaker at international IT security conferences. He specializes in side-channel attacks in which physical effects allow conclusions to be drawn about protected data. He will now receive the ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros for the “FSSec – Foundations for Sustainable Security” project. “IT already consumes 11 percent of the world’s electricity, with a strong upward trend. The question now is how to increase efficiency without causing security gaps at the same time,” explains Daniel Gruss. So far, energy efficiency has not played a role in safety. But Daniel Gruss wants to change that. For example, using cryptography instead of established error correction methods should help systems achieve a significant gain in efficiency compared to current systems due to the increased security. Just last Friday, November 18, Daniel Gruss was awarded the Promotion Prize of the Austrian State of Styria.