About Me

Hi, I'm Niklas. I'm an incoming PostDoc (starting November 2026) in the Secure Software Engineering Group of Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden at Paderborn University, Germany.

I recently completed my doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in computer science at Ruhr University Bochum. I did my doctoral research from 2022 to 2026 in the Software Security Group at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, advised by Dr. Marcel Böhme.

My research interests are the fundamental limits of intelligent agents for security, and secure software synthesis: Can intelligent agents synthesize software that is secure by design?

Outside of research, I'm co-founder and tech lead of everlense, which we founded in April 2022. everlense is a web app for sharing wedding photos and serves around 20k monthly active users with over 2 million image and video uploads each year.

Before starting my doctorate, I worked as a Software Engineer at the German startup clockin (2021–2022) and earned my M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems (2021) and B.Sc. in Cognitive Computer Science (2019), both from Bielefeld University.

Publications

2026

Niklas Risse

Uncovering the Limits of Machine Learning for Software Security

Doctoral Dissertation, Ruhr University Bochum — Dr. rer. nat. (Doctor of Natural Sciences)

Advisor: Dr. Marcel Böhme (CISPA) · Reviewers: Prof. Dr. Andreas Zeller (CISPA / Saarland University), Prof. Dr. sc. Michael Pradel (CISPA / University of Stuttgart) · Chair: Prof. Dr. Kevin Borgolte (Ruhr University Bochum) · Defended August 20, 2026

[pdf] [bib] [defense slides]

Summa cum laude (highest distinction)

Niklas Risse and Marcel Böhme

LLM-Based Agents for Identifying Bug-Introducing Commits

IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

[pdf] [bib] [arxiv] [code]

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Jonathan Evertz*, Niklas Risse*, Nicolai Neuer, Andreas Müller, Philipp Normann, Gaetano Sapia, Srishti Gupta, David Pape, Soumya Shaw, Devansh Srivastav, Christian Wressnegger, Erwin Quiring, Thorsten Eisenhofer, Daniel Arp, and Lea Schönherr

* Equal Contribution

Chasing Shadows: Pitfalls in LLM Security Research

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)

[pdf] [bib] [arxiv] [code] [website]

2025

Niklas Risse, Jing Liu, and Marcel Böhme

Top Score on the Wrong Exam: On Benchmarking in Machine Learning for Vulnerability Detection

ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA)

[pdf] [bib] [arxiv] [code]

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

2024

Niklas Risse and Marcel Böhme

Uncovering the Limits of Machine Learning for Automatic Vulnerability Detection

USENIX Security Symposium

[pdf] [bib] [arxiv] [code] [dataset]

2023

Niklas Risse

Detecting Overfitting of Machine Learning Techniques for Automatic Vulnerability Detection

ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) — Student Research Competition

[pdf] [bib] [doi]

2nd Place, ACM Student Research Competition

2021

Niklas Risse, Christina Göpfert, and Jan Philip Göpfert

How to Compare Adversarial Robustness of Classifiers From a Global Perspective

International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN)

[pdf] [bib] [arxiv] [code]

CV

Research

from 11/2026
Postdoctoral Researcher · Secure Software Engineering Group, Paderborn University
Group of Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden
11/2022 — 08/2026
Doctoral Researcher · Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum
Software Security Group, advised by Dr. Marcel Böhme. Researching the limits of ML for software security tasks
10/2019 — 03/2021
Student Research Assistant · Machine Learning Research Group, Bielefeld University
Evaluating the adversarial robustness of deep neural networks

Industry & Side Projects

since 04/2022
Co-Founder & Tech Lead · everlense

A web app for sharing wedding photos. Guests upload from their phones, the couple keeps everything in one place. I lead the technical side: engineering, architecture, and infrastructure.

20kmonthly active users
2M+image & video uploads / year
04/2021 — 10/2022
Software Engineer · clockin
2019 (6 months)
Intern · Arvato Systems

Education

2022 — 2026
Dr. rer. nat. (Doctorate in Computer Science) · Ruhr University Bochum
Grade: summa cum laude (highest distinction) · Research conducted at MPI-SP
Thesis: Uncovering the Limits of Machine Learning for Software Security
2019 — 2021
M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems · Bielefeld University
2015 — 2019
B.Sc. in Cognitive Computer Science · Bielefeld University

Awards

2026
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award · ASE
LLM-Based Agents for Identifying Bug-Introducing Commits
2025
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award · ISSTA
Top Score on the Wrong Exam
2023
2nd Place, Student Research Competition · ESEC/FSE
Detecting Overfitting of Machine Learning Techniques for Automatic Vulnerability Detection
2018
1st Place, Software Engineering Team Competition · Arvato Systems × Bielefeld University
€2,000 prize money

Reviewing

Program Committees

  • ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2026
  • European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML PKDD), 2020

Reviewer

  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2025 — 3 papers
  • IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2024 — 1 paper
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2024 — 1 paper
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2023 — 1 paper

Talks

Doctoral Defense

  • Uncovering the Limits of Machine Learning for Software Security, 2026 — Bochum, Germany [slides]

Conference Talks

  • ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2025 — Trondheim, Norway
  • USENIX Security Symposium, 2024 — Philadelphia, USA
  • International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN), 2021 — Virtual

Invited Talks

  • TruX Distinguished Seminar Series, University of Luxembourg, 2026 — Virtual