Chair for Software Security

The Chair for Software Security, led by Prof. Dr. Kevin Borgolte, is part of the Faculty of Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum.

We conduct research that concerns itself real-world software and systems, oftentimes networked systems. Our research focuses on software security and Internet security, as well as related privacy issues, such as:

• We explore how to improve, extend, and develop new program analysis techniques for real-world (automatic) vulnerability discovery, with a particular interest for stateful software and network protocols.
• We develop analysis techniques to understand how programs behave in terms of their privacy behavior.
• We work on addressing (large-scale) Internet security issues, such as malware and denial-of-service attacks, and we address measurement blindspots for Internet measurements.
• We study if and how changes in software, protocols, and deployments affect users, focusing on security and privacy questions, and we develop measurement techniques to assess the impact.

We are part of the DFG Cluster of Excellence CASA (Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries) and the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI), and the International Secure Systems Lab (iSecLab).

We are strong advocates for open science and open code/data because we believe it is crucial for the reproducibility of research. Most of our research artifacts are available via our GitHub organization page rub-softsec.

We are almost always looking for talented and bright PhD students or postdocs to join us, as well as visiting PhD students for research internships. You can find more information via Open Positions.