The award is given to engineers up to the age of 40 who have published an outstanding, innovative publication in the field of communications that have initiated, or are expected to have, an impact on the economy.
The work being recognized is his research on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for biometric and device identification. This work spans the entire space from theory to code construction and implementation. His most cited paper is “Privacy, Secrecy, and Storage with Multiple Noisy Measurements of Identifiers” published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) in 2018. This paper derives the key-leakage-storage region for general key agreement models and led to new polar code designs that appeared in the 2019 TIFS paper "Code Constructions for Physical Unclonable Functions and Biometric Secrecy Systems". Implementations are described in the 2018 Entropy paper "Secure and Reliable Key Agreement with Physical Unclonable Functions".
The Johann Philipp Reis Award has been conferred biannually since 1986 by the VDE, the cities of Friedrichsdorf in the Taunus and Gelnhausen, and the Deutsche Telekom. The award is accompanied by a cash prize of 10.000 euro.
Link: https://www.vde.com/de/presse/pressemitteilungen/johann-philipp-preis-2021