On April 1, 2025, the Department of Information Systems welcomed Dr. Johannes Sedlmeir as Acting Professor for Statistics, Security & Trust.

After completing his master’s degree in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, he did  his doctorate at the University of Bayreuth and the Branch Business & Information Systems Engineering  of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technologie FIT, focusing on the challenges and potential of using blockchain technology in organizations. Since October 2022, he has been conducting research in the FINATRAX (Digital Financial Services and Cross-Organisational Digital Transformations) research group at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg. There, he investigated both economic and technical aspects of new digital technologies, particularly in the field of applied cryptography. In addition to blockchain technology, a particular focus of his research lies in digital wallets (the underlying paradigm is also known as ‘self-sovereign identity’). Dr. Sedlmeir is also a lecturer at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), where he holds block seminars on blockchain technology and digital identity management twice a year.

We would like to welcome Dr Johannes Sedlmeir to the Department of Information Systems and asked him a few questions at the beginning of his work:

Dear Dr. Sedlmeir, after your time in Luxembourg, you are continuing your academic career at the University of Münster. What motivated you to return to Germany and teach and research at the University of Münster?

Firstly, the University of Münster in general and the Deparment of Information Systems in particular enjoy an excellent reputation, and I am sure that the university and the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) founded there offer the perfect environment for my interdisciplinary research. In addition, there are many points of contact with my new colleagues' areas of focus, both in terms of methodology (e.g. design science research) and content (e.g. new mobility concepts, the detection and combating of disinformation and the management of cross-organisational processes), which I would like to discuss with them. I would also like to contribute to establishing the topics of digital identity management and applications of modern cryptography in the areas of security, data protection and trust in data at a new location and to bring them into teaching and research projects.

I am also very much looking forward to being able to give large and, for a Information Systems  degree program, highly technically-oriented basic lectures at the University of Münster, as my previous work had a stronger focus on industry cooperation and specialised seminars and I was therefore limited to smaller and more specialized courses. I have enjoyed teaching since I was a student and I hope that I can inspire the students in the lectures for my research topics and at the same time emphasize the relevance of basic education for current challenges in society and the economy.

One of your main areas of research is digital identities. What exactly is this about and what fascinates you most about this topic?

Digital identity management is one of the basic prerequisites for successful digital transformation, both in terms of IT security and the efficiency of processes based on data exchange and access rights. Today's identity management is extremely fragmented – both for end users as well as for organizations and networked devices. This inevitably leads to low user-friendliness, security gaps, high costs and lock-in effects for providers of solutions for IAM systems. These challenges can be addressed with a unified, user-centric system that uses modern cryptography and stores machine-verifiable proof of identity locally. At the same time, an approach based on ‘digital wallets’ increases users' control over which data they pass on to which organizations, which can largely address the usual criticism of a lack of data protection in the digital space. Furthermore, reducing the dependencies of digital identity ecosystems is also a key to greater European digital sovereignty, for example as an alternative or supplement to single sign-on solutions from large technology platforms and web PKI. Last but not least, secure digital identities also enable machine-verifiable transaction data, on the basis of which the creation of many digital proofs becomes possible in the first place, especially in cross-organisational processes.

On the other hand, many projects to improve digital identity management have also failed in the past due to various technical and non-technical hurdles. In this respect, I find it very exciting to learn from these attempts and to actively support the hopefully successful implementation this time, both as a scientific observer and by developing innovative solutions for and based on digital identities. I also appreciate the combination of cryptographic and economic aspects in the successful implementation of digital wallets, which make interdisciplinary research necessary and provide a holistic perspective that can also offer valuable insights in other areas of digital transformation.

What research projects are you currently working on?

Similar to the German Fraunhofer Institutes, the SnT is characterised by a very strong industry focus, where research projects are strongly demand-oriented and interdisciplinary. My current favorite projects deal with potential security issues of Bitcoin induced by the quadrennial “halving”, the controversy around qualified website certificates and European digital sovereignty between browser providers, the European Commission and European trust service providers in the context of the amendment of the eIDAS regulation, as well as applications of digital wallets in organizations and general security and privacy challenges arising from the current implementation plan of European digital wallets (EUDI wallets). In addition, I am also working on the development of verifiable data-driven processes between financial institutions and the privacy-oriented tokenization of artworks on public blockchains - the latter is a public research project funded by the Luxembourg Fonds National de la Recherche, which I was able to acquire in collaboration with the APSIA research group for applied cryptography at the SnT and which ultimately attracted me to Luxembourg.

What courses will you be offering students in the future?

I will be offering two lectures and two seminars in the  summer semester 2025. In the bachelor's lecture ‘Security of Distributed Systems’, I will first introduce the general basics of distributed systems and then use this preliminary work to provide an insight into both classic (e.g. security of email and web PKI) and highly topical security-related issues in the context of distributed systems, such as challenges for the security of cryptocurrencies and blockchains as well as digital wallets, where both cryptographic and economic design aspects are crucial. In the master's lecture ‘Trust and Security in Data Science’, I will first highlight challenges regarding access control in cross-organizational data exchange and the verification of the origin and trustworthiness of data.

We will then look at typical problems and paradoxes in data analysis and statistical and cryptographic approaches to solving them. The seminars then delve deeper into more general current issues in European digital wallets and a critical examination of perspectives on the potential and challenges of blockchain technology that are often one-sided or driven by business interests. To give one example: Proponents of bitcoin mining often argue that mining hardware can easily be switched off, thereby stabilizing power grids, promoting the expansion of renewables or using waste heat for heating. However, counter-arguments are sometimes ignored, such as the fact that mining is initially an additional consumer from a grid perspective, that the high investments in mining hardware make grid-friendly behavior with volatile generation economically difficult and that heating with waste heat makes little sense in summer and has major efficiency disadvantages compared to a heat pump in winter. So, you can see that I approach passionately controversial topics with a high degree of interdisciplinarity from the perspective of business informatics in order to provide a balanced perspective that can then inform the broader discourse.

In the coming winter semester, I will be giving the introductory lecture on data and probabilities for business IT specialists, which I am particularly looking forward to as a former mathematical physicist.

Is there a course that you are particularly interested in and would like to take yourself?

This is probably the most difficult of the questions because there are simply too many topics that interest me. As an enthusiastic supporter of electromobility, for example, I would be interested in courses on battery management or the quantitative evaluation of data on battery health during operation, the coordination of charging processes in a more system or grid-friendly way and more user-friendly charging planning and payment. On the other hand, I find the mathematical foundations of the latest generation of artificial intelligence (large language models) very exciting and would like to delve even deeper into the unfortunately often underestimated challenges and possibilities of supplementing these with fundamentally different (e.g. neuro-symbolic) approaches.