Steffen Fries studied information technology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany. Since 1995 he has been working in the area of security technologies within Siemens Corporate Technologies. He is focusing on security assessments, security concepts and architecture definition. In this regard he represented the security interest of the Siemens Enterprise business unit in the IETF standardization for multimedia security for several years. Meanwhile his main interest is the security of the energy automation area. Consequently, he is active in the standardization of smart grid security in the IEC. He has been involved in several internal product development projects as well as research projects within Siemens but also in publicly funded projects.