This is the MPI Software Security group lead by Dr Marcel Böhme at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Germany. We are interested in the automatic discovery of security flaws in software systems at the very large scale. Some of us work on the foundations of automatic vulnerability discovery and program analysis in general. For instance, we seek to identify fundamental limitations of existing techniques, we study empirical methods (incl. statistical and causal reasoning) for program analysis, and we explore the assurances that software testing provides when no bugs are found. Another part of our group develops practical vulnerability discovery tools that are widely used in software security practice. For instance, Entropic is the default power schedule in LibFuzzer which powers the largest fuzzing platforms at Google and Microsoft, fuzzing hundreds of security-critical projects on 100k machines 24/7. Our tools have discovered 100+ bugs in widely-used software systems, more than 70 of which are security-critical vulnerabilities registered as CVEs at the US National Vulnerability Database.
News
- Dec 2023 Paper on the extrapolation of the current coverage rate accepted at ICSE’24! Congrats to Danushka and Seongmin!
- Dec 2023 Niklas Risse wins 2nd place in the ACM ESEC/FSE Student Research Compentition. Congrats Niklas!
- Oct 2023 Our discovery of a connection between fuzzing and information theory is this month’s CACM research highlight! CACM is the monthly journal sent to all members of the ACM. The CACM Technical Perspective was written by the amazing Prof Gordon Fraser.
- Oct 2023 Paper on protocol fuzzing equipped with LLMs to interrogate protocol RFCs accepted at NDSS’24! Congrats Ruijie and team!
- Oct 2023 Teaching a seminar on software and network security with Kevin Borgolte! Looking forward to the papers and experiments!
- Aug 2023 Created a new web presence for the MPI Software Security Group.
- Aug 2023 Co-organized the CASA Summer School on Software Security in Bochum. Thanks to all the speakers and participants!
- Aug 2023 Two papers on statistical reasoning about programs accepted at ESEC/FSE’23 and ASE’23. Congrats Seongmin and Nikhil et al.!
- Older news…
Opportunities
We are always looking to recruit
👩🎓 PhD students and
👩💻 interns
in Software Security. Just reach out via email.
You'll need a strong background in one of:
* Statistics, data science,
ML (causality, security flaws), and/or
* Program analysis, system building,
vulnerability discovery, CTFs.
People
Graduate Students (Main advisor)
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Niklas Risse
PhD Student (MPI-SP / CASA)
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Ardi Madadi
Incoming PhD Student
Graduate Students (Co-advisor)
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Zac Hatfield-Dodds
PhD student (ANU, on leave @ Anthropic, w/ Tony Hosking)
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Philipp Görz
PhD student (CISPA / RUB, w/ Thorsten Holz)
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Leon Weiß
PhD student (CASA / RUB, w/ Kevin Borgolte)
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Tobias Holl
PhD student (CASA / RUB, w/ Kevin Borgolte)
Interns and Visiting Researchers
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Jing Liu
UCI, USA
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Haoxin Tu
SMU, Singapore
Faculty
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Marcel Böhme
Faculty member
Research Fellows
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Seongmin Lee
Research Fellow
Visiting Profs
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Eleonora Losiouk
U of Padova, Italy
Past Research Fellows
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Zahra Mirzamomen
PostDoc 2020-23. Now at Monash University.
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Van-Thuan Pham
PostDoc 2018-20. Now at University of Melbourne.
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Behrad Garmany
PostDoc 2022. RUB, Germany. Now at Onapsis Inc.
Alumni
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Danushka Liyanage
PhD 2023. Now at University of Sydney, Australia.
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Charaka Geethal Kapugama
PhD 2023. Now at University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka.
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Anjana Perera
PhD 2022 (co-adviced). Now at Oracle Labs, Australia.
Past Research Assistents
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Octavio Galland
2022/23. U. of Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Bharath Krish
2020-22. Monash U, Australia. Now at Deloitte.
Past Interns and Visiting Researchers
- Rafaila Galanopoulou 2023. Athens University, Greece
- Abhishek Shah 2023. Columbia University, USA
- Simran Kathpalia 2023. Amrita University, India
- Shreyas Minocha 2023. Rice University, USA
- Stephan Lipp 2022. TU Munich, Germany
- Nikhil Parasaram 2022. University College London, UK
- Dongjia Zhang 2022. Tokyo University, Japan.
- Christian Presa Schnell 2022. TU Munich, Germany
Past Undergraduate Students
- Robert Stark 2022. MSc thesis (co-adviced). Moved to Bosch.
- Tobias Wienand 2022. BSc thesis (co-adviced).