Christian Werling

Berlin, Germany

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate at TU Berlin, Security in Telecommunications (SecT) with Prof. Jean-Pierre Seifert. My research interests mainly lie in Platform Security and Confidential Computing.

In the past, I published research about AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) at the ACM CCS and presented a jailbreak of Tesla's infotainment system at BlackHat. I am also the maintainer of PSPTool.

Before returning to campus to pursue my Ph.D., I worked for two years as a security consultant at Security Research Labs.

I hold a Master of Science in "IT Systems Engineering" from Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam. During my studies, I gained experience as an Embedded Systems Developer and Security Engineer in two IoT startups.

Publications

2023
faulTPM - Exposing AMD fTPM's Deepest Secrets
Hans Niklas Jacob, Christian Werling, Robert Buhren, Jean-Pierre Seifert
8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2023.
2022
EM-Fault It Yourself: Building a Replicable EMFI Setup for Desktop and Server Hardware
Niclas Kühnapfel, Robert Buhren, Hans Niklas Jacob, Thilo Krachenfels, Christian Werling, Jean-Pierre Seifert
IEEE Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE), 2022.
2019
Insecure Until Proven Updated: Analyzing AMD SEV's Remote Attestation
Robert Buhren, Christian Werling, Jean-Pierre Seifert
ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2023.

Talks

2023 Back in the Driver's Seat: Recovering Critical Data from Tesla Autopilot Using Voltage Glitching
Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel, Hans Niklas Jacob, and Oleg Drokin
37th Chaos Communication Congress, Hamburg (37C3)
Jailbreaking an Electric Vehicle in 2023 or What It Means to Hotwire Tesla's x86-Based Seat Heater
Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel, Hans Niklas Jacob, and Oleg Drokin
BlackHat USA 2023, Las Vegas
2019 Uncover, Understand, Own - Regaining Control Over Your AMD CPU
Robert Buhren, Alexander Eichner and Christian Werling
36th Chaos Communication Congress, Leipzig (36C3)
Dissecting the AMD Platform Security Processor
Christian Werling and Robert Buhren
Chaos Communication Camp 2019

Theses

If you are eager to write your Bachelor's or Master's thesis in Embedded Systems Security, Platform Security, or Confidential Computing, don't hesitate to contact me. Down below, you can find previous theses that I supervised.

2024 Konzeption und Umsetzung einer API zur Gewährleistung der Sicherheit bei der Speicherung sensibler Daten mittels LUKS-Containern
AMD Root of Trust Management: Reverse-Engineering Tesla's PSP Client
2023 Emulation-Based Fuzzing of UEFI Firmware: Exploring the Attack Vector of Removable Media to Compromise Boot Integrity
Investigating the Effectiveness of Sandboxing as a Technique for Securing Video Game Console Emulators
Subverting Measured Boot by Compromising Static Root of Trust Measurements on x86 Firmware
QEMU-PSP: Generalizing a Unicorn-based emulator for the AMD Secure Processor by porting it to QEMU
Fuzzing the AMD SP's ROM bootloader with LibAFL using QEMU full-system emulation
2022 A Practical Analysis of UEFI Threats Against Windows 11
FCAT: Design and Implementation of a Firmware Collection and Analysis Tool