Nils Rollshausen, M.Sc.

Wearable Security & Interoperability / Researcher

Contact Information

Pankratiusstr. 2
S2|20 202
nrollshausen@seemoo.tu-darmstadt.de

Biography

Nils is a PhD candidate at TU Darmstadt's Secure Mobile Networking Lab. Somehow — and without ever having owned more than an iPod — Nils fell down the Apple rabbit hole and now spends their days reverse-engineering Apple's devices and uncovering the bits of magic hiding inside the machines that surround us every day. They are interested in all things privacy & security and like to build new things every now and then, instead of only breaking what's already there.

Selected Talks

WatchWitch — Hacking the Apple Watch at Troopers24
Over the Garden Wall — Let's steal data from your iPhone at Troopers25
Few things, everywhere, all at once at MRMCD25

Awards

2024 Freudenberg Award Digital Science
2024 CAST Award

Teaching

Co-supervision of the Reverse-Engineering Lab
Coordination of the Secure Mobile Systems lecture
Supervision of selected topics in the Secure Mobile Networking Labs and Seminars

Offered Theses Topics

Type

Year

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2025 In progress

Tools for Automated Protocol Analysis

Supervisor: Nils Rollshausen

What's the state of the art in automatic analysis of unknown binary payloads / protocols? How can we design usable tools to aid researchers in understanding them?

2025 Completed

Hiding in Plain Sight: LLM Steganography for Instant Messaging

Supervisor: Nils Rollshausen

Large Language Models as "next word prediction engines" can be used in interesting ways to embed secret messages in plausible-looking cover-text. This thesis investigates using LLMs for steganography in the context of an Android instant messaging app.

2025 Completed

Fuzzing the Unfuzzable? A Comparative Analysis of Fuzzing Methods for Apple Watch Communication Protocols

Supervisor: Nils Rollshausen

The Apple Watch, like other IoT devices, uses a host of different bespoke wireless protocols. How can we use fuzzing to systematically test Apple's implementation for security issues?

2024 Completed

Security Analysis of a Kids Smartwatch

Supervisor: Nils Rollshausen

Tech companies are increasingly marketing smartwatches to children. But are the manufacturers taking appropriate measures to protect children's health and location data? This thesis investigates the popular Xplora X6 play smartwatch.

2024 Available now

Assorted Topics in Wearable Security & Adversarial Interoperability

Supervisor: Nils Rollshausen

Unfortunately, I can not supervise any additional theses this semester. Are you interested in wearable devices, reverse engineering, security research, mobile ecosystems, and interoperability? I might just have a topic for you. Possible topics could be: Explore cross-network collaborative content blocking on social media Create hardware gadgets for adversarial interoperability between "incompatible" smart ecosystems Reverse-engineer & analyze interesting aspects of Apple's ecosystem Explore how to analyze unknown binary data Create an amazing dataset to benchmark reverse-engineering tools Whether you're interested in one of those topics or have an idea of your own in this area, get in touch and we can have a chat.

Publications

Type

Year

Show awards only

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2024 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2024) Conference

PairSonic: Helping Groups Securely Exchange Contact Information

Florentin Putz Steffen Haesler Thomas Völkl Maximilian Gehring Nils Rollshausen Matthias Hollick

PDF BibTeX DOI: 10.1145/3678884.3681818

Abstract

Securely exchanging contact information is essential for establishing trustworthy communication channels that facilitate effective online collaboration. However, current methods are neither user-friendly nor scalable for large groups of users. In response, we introduce PairSonic, a novel group pairing protocol that extends trust from physical encounters to online communication. PairSonic simplifies the pairing process by automating the tedious verification tasks of previous methods through an acoustic out-of-band channel using smartphones' built-in hardware. Our protocol not only facilitates connecting users for computer-supported collaboration, but also provides a more user-friendly and scalable solution to the authentication ceremonies currently used in end-to-end encrypted messengers like Signal or WhatsApp. PairSonic is available as open-source software: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/pairsonic