About Me

Hi, I'm Niklas. I'm a final-year PhD candidate in the Software Security Group at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany, 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 PhD, 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

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]

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

since 11/2022
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

2019 — 2021
M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems · Bielefeld University
2015 — 2019
B.Sc. in Cognitive Computer Science · Bielefeld University

Awards

2025
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award · ISSTA
Top Score on the Wrong Exam
2023
2nd Place, Student Research Competition · ESEC/FSE
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

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