After studying communications engineering at TH Cologne (1988) and electrical engineering at the University of Siegen (1991), Christof completed his PhD in coding theory at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics of the University of Duisburg-Essen (1994). From 1995-2001, he was assistant and associate professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Christof became full professor at Ruhr University Bochum in 2001, where he headed the Embedded Security Group. In 2019, he became one of the founding directors of the newly established Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum. He is also research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His group's research focuses on engineering aspects in modern cybersecurity, including hardware security, cognitive aspects of reverse engineering, physical layer security, applied cryptography and security analysis of real-world systems.
Christof is one of four founding members of the Research Center.