Nico Martin, M.Sc.

Researcher & PhD Student

E-Mail	nico.martin@uni-tuebingen.de
Room	B303
Address	Lehrstuhl für Kommunikationsnetze Universität Tübingen Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut für Informatik Sand 13, 72076 Tübingen
Other

Nico Martin speaking at the OAuth Security Workshop 2026

About me

I am a PhD student and research assistant at the Chair of Communication Networks (Prof. Dr. Michael Menth) at the University of Tübingen. My research is about identity and authorization on the Internet: I work on making OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect more secure and easier to use, with a focus on end-to-end user authentication based on OIDC².

Timeline

2019 - 2023

B.Sc. Software Engineering

Graduated at Hochschule Heilbronn

2023 - 2025

M.Sc. Media Informatics

Graduated at University of Tübingen

Since February 2026

PhD Student & Research assistant

Research assistant at the Department of Computer Science, Chair of Communication Networks, University of Tübingen

Research Interests

OAuth 2.0 – Secure and Usable Authorization

OAuth is the backbone of delegated authorization on the web, yet implementing it correctly is still hard. With OAuthorize, we explore how authorization requirements can be discovered automatically, which takes much of the OAuth handling away from application developers.

OpenID Connect & End-to-End Identity

Billions of users log in with OpenID Connect. I investigate how identity providers can also vouch for users towards each other. This enables end-to-end authentication for email, instant messaging, and video conferencing without complex key management.

Standardization

Research only has impact if it is adopted. I bring our ideas into the standardization community, e.g., at the IETF and the OAuth Security Workshop, and follow the OpenID Foundation's work on key binding for OpenID Connect.

Focus: OIDC² – Open Identity Certification with OpenID Connect

OpenID Connect (OIDC) lets users log in to many services with a single account, but it only proves a user's identity to applications, not to other users. OIDC² closes this gap with Identity Certification Tokens (ICTs): short-lived, JSON-based certificates that an OpenID Provider issues for a public key generated by the user's client.

The communication partner verifies the ICT together with a proof of possession of the private key, provided they trust the issuing provider. Because ICTs are short-lived, neither long-term key management nor certificate revocation lists are needed.

Use cases include:

Email: signing PGP-secured emails with ICTs instead of relying on the Web of Trust
Video conferencing: verifying participants as a countermeasure against deepfake attacks
Instant messaging: authenticating chat partners end-to-end

OIDC² is being standardized in the OpenID Foundation. At IETF 126, we discussed extending OpenID Connect Key Binding to these end-to-end use cases.

Further reading from our group:

J. Primbs and M. Menth: OIDC²: Open Identity Certification with OpenID Connect. IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, 2024.
J. Primbs and M. Menth: Usability Improvements for PGP-Secured Email Communication Using OIDC². Open Identity Summit (OID), 2026.

Projects

KoALA

KoALA

Sensor-Assisted Telepsychotherapy for Children with OCD

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in childhood carries a high risk of becoming chronic. Exposure exercises are at the core of cognitive behavioral therapy and are most effective when they are tailored to the individual child.

KoALA investigates the feasibility of a technology-supported psychotherapy for children aged 4 to 12 with OCD. Therapy sessions take place via video conference and are followed by a digital aftercare phase that families carry out on their own. A newly developed wearable sensor system measures the child's arousal during exposure exercises in everyday life to personalize the treatment, while a koala robot toy and a therapy app with an adventure game keep the children motivated.

My role: I manage KoALA's entire IT infrastructure and lead the development of the therapy app and all backend services, including DevOps and the integration of the wearable sensor system.

Consortium: University Hospital Tübingen (Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, coordinator), Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, Codext GmbH, and the Chair of Communication Networks, University of Tübingen
Funding: Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), funding call "GamKi"
Duration: March 2025 – February 2028

Project page at interaktive-technologien.de
KoALA in the FIT research database of the University of Tübingen

Venues

IETF 126 · Vienna, Austria · July 2026

Nico Martin with colleagues at IETF 126 in Vienna

Park in Vienna at sunset during IETF 126

IETF 126 · Vienna, Austria · July 2026

My first IETF meeting: a week of hopping between working group sessions and side meetings, and getting to know many new people in the hallways in between. In our side meeting, we discussed our research ideas on extending OpenID Connect Key Binding to end-to-end authentication use cases such as email, instant messaging, and video conferencing.

OAuth Security Workshop 2026 · Leipzig, Germany · May 2026

View over Leipzig during the OAuth Security Workshop 2026

Workshop participants listening to a talk at the OAuth Security Workshop 2026

OAuth Security Workshop 2026 · Leipzig, Germany · May 2026

A few inspiring days of talks, discussions, and unconference sessions with the OAuth community. We had the opportunity to present OAuthorize, our idea for making OAuth easier to use by automatically discovering authorization requirements and taking much of the OAuth handling away from application developers.

Publications

Papers

No publications yet – coming soon.

Teaching

Courses

Network Security I (INFO-4341, 6 ECTS, lecture with exercises): principles of network security, cryptographic methods, public key infrastructures, authentication, application layer and transport layer security, virtual private networks, layer-2 and perimeter security, anonymization, and blockchain.
Network Security II (INFO-4342, 3 ECTS, lecture with exercises): layer-2 security, perimeter security, anonymization, blockchain, and advanced topics.

Both courses are taught by Prof. Dr. Michael Menth.

Supervised Theses

Year	Degree	Title
2026	B.Sc.	Entwicklung und Untersuchung von Moving-Average basierten Methoden zur Quantifizierung von Herzratenvariabilität
2026	M.Sc.	Design and Implementation of OIDC²-Based Service Authentication and End-to-End Encryption in the KoALA Project
2026	B.Sc.	Konzeption und Implementierung eines Metadatengenerators für Vertragsdokumente im DORA-Informationsregister unter Zuhilfenahme moderner AI- und LLM-Technologien
2026	B.Sc.	Konzeption und Implementierung eines Regressionstest-Frameworks für dynamische GUI-Strukturen in USU Service Management mit Hilfe von Microsoft Playwright
2026	M.Sc.	Konzeption, Implementierung und Evaluation eines erweiterten Technologiegraphen zur kontextbasierten Priorisierung von Schwachstellen unter Berücksichtigung von Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)