Institute of Information Resource Management

About

Sebastian Zillien is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Organization and Management of Information Systems (OMI) at Ulm University. He received his Bachelor’s degree in 2018 and his Master’s degree in 2020 from Worms University of Applied Sciences.

Since 2016, he has been working as a research associate, focusing on network security, particularly on Covert Channels as well as their analysis, detection, and application.

As part of his academic work, he has been involved in several research projects, including KIASH, EMPOWER, and ATTRIBUT, contributing to various research and development activities.

Research

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Publications

18.
Wendzel S, Volpert S, Zillien S, Lenz J, Rünz P, Caviglione L. A Survey of Internet Censorship and its Measurement: Methodology, Trends, and Challenges. Computers & Security. 2026; 164      [DOI] 
17.
Velinov A, Mileva A, Volpert S, Zillien S, Wendzel S. Steganography in the QUIC Communication Protocol. Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS). 2026; 32(2):181-208.      [DOI] 
16.
Wendzel S, Zillien S, Zander S. AMPhitryon: Efficient small data compression for low-bandwidth covert channels. In: Proc. 41st ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (IFIP SEC 2026). Springer; 2026.
15.
Lenz J, Volpert S, Zillien S, Rünz P, Caviglione L, Wendzel S. Digital Control: National Tactics of Internet Censorship. In: European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference (EICC 2026). Springer; 2026.
14.
Wendzel S, Caviglione L, Mazurczyk W, Mileva A, Dittmann J, Krätzer C, Lamshöft K, Vielhauer C, Hartmann L, Keller J, Neubert T, Zillien S. A Generic Taxonomy for Steganography Methods. ACM Comput. Surv.. 2025;      [DOI]      [File] 
13.
Wendzel S, Schmidbauer T, Zillien S, Keller J. DYST (Did You See That?): An Amplified Covert Channel That Points To Previously Seen Data. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). 2025; 22(1):614-631.      [DOI]      [File] 
12.
Petrov D, Ruffing P, Zillien S, Wendzel S. Domainator: Detecting and Identifying DNS-Tunneling Malware Using Metadata Sequences. In: Dalla Preda, Mila and Schrittwieser, Sebastian and Naessens, Vincent and De Sutter, Bjorn, editors. Availability, Reliability and Security. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland; 2025. p. 118—140.
11.
Zillien S, Schmidbauer T, Kubek M, Keller J, Wendzel S. Look What's There! Utilizing the Internet's Existing Data for Censorship Circumvention with OPPRESSION. In: Proc. 19th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS 2024). ACM; 2024. p. 80—95.      [DOI]      [File] 
10.
Aehle M, Alme J, Barnaföldi GG, Blühdorn J, Bodova T, Borshchov V, Brink A, Eikeland VN, Feofilov G, Garth C, Gauger NR, Grøttvik OS, Helstrup H, Igolkin S, Keidel R, Kobdaj C, Kortus T, Kusch L, Leonhardt V, Mehendale S, Mulawade RN, Odland OH, O'Neill G, Papp G, Peitzmann T, Pettersen HES, Piersimoni P, Pochampalli R, Protsenko M, Rauch M, Rehman AU, Richter M, Roehrich D, Sagebaum M, Santana J, Schilling A, Seco J, Songmoolnak A, Sudár Á, Tambave G, Tymchuk I, Ullaland K, Varga-Kőfaragó M, Volz L, Wagner B, Wendzel S, Wiebel A, Xiao R, Yang S, Zillien S. Exploration of differentiability in a proton computed tomography simulation framework. Physics in Medicine and Biology. 2023; 68(24):      [DOI]      [File] 
9.
Schilling A, Aehle M, Alme J, Barnaföldi GG, Bodova T, Borshchov V, Brink A, Eikeland VN, Feofilov G, Garth C, Gauger NR, Grøttvik OS, Helstrup H, Igolkin S, Keidel R, Kobdaj C, Kortus T, Leonhardt V, Mehendale S, Mulawade RN, Odland OH, O'Neill G, Papp G, Peitzmann T, Pettersen HES, Piersimoni P, Protsenko M, Rauch M, Rehman AU, Richter M, Roehrich D, Santana J, Seco J, Songmoolnak A, Sudár Á, Tambave G, Tymchuk I, Ullaland K, Varga-Kőfaragó M, Volz L, Wagner B, Wendzel S, Wiebel A, Xiao R, Yang S, Zillien S. Uncertainty-aware spot rejection rate as quality metric for proton therapy using a digital tracking calorimeter. Physics in Medicine and Biology. 2023; 68194001.      [DOI]      [File] 

Open Theses and Projects

1.
Censorship Circumvention Techniques and Measurements [Bachelor/Master].