Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden

Short bio

Eric Bodden is one of the leading experts on secure software engineering, with a specialty in building highly precise tools for automated program analysis. He is Professor for Secure Software Engineering at Paderborn University and director for Software Engineering and IT-Security at Fraunhofer IEM, where he is collaborating with the leading national and international software development companies. Further, he is a member of the directorate of the Collaborative Research Center CROSSING at TU Darmstadt.

Software Projects

Bodden is one of the chief maintainers of the Soot program analysis and optimization framework, a contributor to the AspectBench Compiler, the open research compiler for AspectJ, the inventor of the Clara and TamiFlex frameworks. Together with his research group, he has created the FlowDroid analysis framework for Android and the DroidBench benchmark suite. The group's blog gives more information about the group's current research.

Extended bio

Until 2015, Bodden was heading the Fraunhofer SIT, Technische Universität Darmstadt and the European Center for Security and Privacy by Design (EC SPRIDE), as well as the Emmy Noether Group RUNSECURE funded through the DFG. At this time he also was a Principal Investigator of the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED).

Until fall 2011, Bodden was a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Software Technology Group of the Technical University Darmstadt. During this time, he also coordinated the Graduate School at CASED.

As a graduate student, Bodden pursued his doctoral studies at the Sable Research Group at McGill University, under the supervision of Laurie Hendren. His thesis work was on evaluating runtime monitors ahead of time. As a result of his work, he created the Clara framework.

His Diploma thesis was on J-LO, the Java Logical Observer. J-LO was the first tool to conduct runtime verification using aspects, and it was one of the first tools that allows for parametric runtime verification, i.e., runtime monitors that reason about per-object properties rather than “flat” properties. It turns out that this was quite a trendsetter, as today most runtime verification tools use both aspects and parameters. The paper Efficient and Expressive Runtime Verification for Java, describing this idea, won the Grand Finals of the worldwide ACM Student Research Competition in 2005.

From 2004 to 2005, Bodden used to be a member of the Microsoft Student Partner program, representing the RWTH Aachen University.

During July to September 2003 he was working at IBM UK at Hursley at the Java performance team where, together with another student, he designed and implemented a performance monitoring framework for J9, IBM’s Java Virtual Machine. Some principles are now patented.

From September 2002 till June 2003 Bodden was at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) for studying a year abroad.