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Talk by Marcel Böhme, Fuzzing Book co-author, on 13 January 10:00
Written on 08.01.2026 10:00 by Andreas Zeller
On January 13 at 10:00, Marcel Böhme, co-author of the Fuzzing Book and an eminent fuzzing researcher, will visit CISPA. Feel free to join us for his talk. (Our regular lecture will still take place at 14:15.) Details on Marcel's talk below:
Marcel Böhme: Automatic Software Security at Scale
January 13, 10:00 - 11:30, CISPA Stuhlsatzenhaus Lecture Hall
Abstract. The security of our software systems has never been more important. Just this week, a Principal Engineer at Google announced that a coding agent created in a few hours what her entire team spent one year to build. Soon, our software systems will rapidly change and evolve with minimal human intervention in reaction to user needs and requirements. Yet, as we are grappling with LLM hallucinations and trustworthiness, how do we ensure that our systems today and those “machine-developed” systems of the future are reliable and secure?
In this talk, we will explore the exciting opportunities and the fundamental limitations of automatic security analysis and testing techniques. We will discuss why only an exponential increase in the number of machines will give us at most a linear increase in the number of bugs that a security testing tool can find and why, once we have started, we can never really stop running automatic, continuous security testing. We will discuss the degree to which testing can show the absence of bugs and extend our statistical approach to a more general paradigm called empirical program analysis which scales to the machine-developed software systems of the future.
Bio. Marcel Böhme is a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) where he leads the Software Security group. He is the elected Spokesperson for Research Group Leaders at the Chemistry, Physics, and Technology Section of the Max Planck Society, a Guest Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor for the ACM TOSEM, the flagship journal in Software Engineering, and on the steering committees of ASE and ISSTA, two of the largest, premier conferences in his area. He was named 2025 ACM Distinguished Member and won a 2024 ERC Consolidator grant, a 2022 NUS Outstanding Young Computing Alumni Award, a 2019 ARC DECRA (Australia's ERC Starting), and several ACM Distinguished Paper awards, spotlights, and highlights at the premier publication venues for security and software engineering. Marcel received his PhD at the National University of Singapore. To find out more about his group and their research, head over to: https://mpi-softsec.github.io.