Christof is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany. He is also, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a Fellow of the IACR and IEEE. His research includes areas of light-weight cryptography, efficient cryptographic implementations, cryptographic Trojans and physical layer security. Christof is one of the co-creators of the PRESENT light-weight cipher and of the PRINCE block cipher,  In 2003, he founded Escrypt GmbH together with Willi Mann-heims,  and which was one of the first companies to focus on industrial data security. Since 2012, Escrypt has been part of Bosch.