Dr. Patrick Stöckle

Siemens AG

Research Scientist • March 2023 – Present, Munich

In my job as expert for cloud and container security at Siemens, I help people to use these technologies securely. I train people internally, but also externally in collaboration with universities. My colleague Benedikt Hofmann and I conducted, for example, a practicum on container security at the TUM. Furthermore, we develop tools and approaches to support people at Siemens securing their containerized environments.

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Research Assistant • November 2017 – February 2023, Munich

I have been working at the Chair of Software and Systems Engineering. I worked for 4 years on an industry-funded project about security configuration. Furthermore, I was teaching in the form of central exercises and tutorials, notably as the leading teaching assistant of the course Security Engineering from 2019 until 2022. I created the practical exercises in this course and graded and explained them. Furthermore, I organized the final exam.

3iMedia GmbH

Software Engineer • August 2014 – March 2017, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen

Web Development, Mobile App Development

Schülerhilfe Ettlingen

Student Tutor • May 2012 – July 2014, Ettlingen

Student tutor for Mathematics, Latin Language, and Physics.

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Dr. rer. nat., Informatics • November 2017 – June 2024

Thesis Title: A Holistic Approach for Security Configuration
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Alexander Pretschner.
2^nd supervisor: Associate Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.sc. / BSc Jürgen Cito.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Master of Science, Informatics • April 2016 – September 2017

Master's thesis's title: Model Versioning with Consistency Conservation in Vitruvius in the context of the VITRUVIUS project.
Majors: Software Engineering and Software Security.
Minor: Economics with focus on Game Theory.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Bachelor of Science, Informatics • October 2012 – March 2016

Bachelor's thesis's title: Partikelbasierte Erweiterung und Laufzeitoptimierung der Prädiktion von Posen gesuchter Objekte mittels Implicit Shape Models in the context of the Active Scene Recognition project.
Minor: Mathematics (Algebra).

Eichendorff-Gymnasium Ettlingen

Abitur • 2012

IT Security and Security Configuration

Since the IT security focus in my master's degree, I have been heavily involved with this. Later, in my PhD, I worked on a cooperation project between the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Siemens on security configuration. Security misconfigurations enable many cyberattacks and make most of them easier than necessary. Through the experience of that project, I know very well about practical IT security problems and how to fix them. In the industry project, I developed tools to help administrators to harden their systems. If organizations hardened their infrastructure using these tools now, they would prevent data breaches and ransomware attacks in the future.

Teaching and Supervision

I am a good teacher who can help people better understand complex matters. From 2019 until 2022, I was the leading teaching assistant for the course Security Engineering at the TUM, with ca. 300 enlisted students every year. I renovated much of the existing but outdated course material during this time and added more recent and relevant content.
Furthermore, I introduced graded, hands-on programming exercises; if the students got more than 66% of the points, they received a 0.3 bonus on their final grade. I provided the exercises to the students via the Artemis Learning Platform. Before introducing these graded programming exercises, there were only a couple of student submissions every week. Afterward, over 100 students submitted, on average, a solution per week, and over 80 students received the bonus in the end. Motivating these students to not only study the theory for the exam but also make their hands dirty and implement the stuff made them learn even more.
During my time at the TUM, I supervised 13 bachelor's/master's theses. Although I supervised them, I learned a lot from my students. Supporting others with advice and guidance and seeing how they solved some problems I struggled with or came up with ideas I had never thought about was an incredible experience.

Programming and Software Engineering

I am an experienced programmer with a lot of experience in different languages. Currently, the language I use the most is Python 🐍, but I learned to program with Java ☕️. During my studies, I also programmed in C, C++, Haskell, TypeScript, Xtend, and Kotlin. Currently, I'm working a lot with Rego which is inspired by Datalog/Prolog. Furthermore, I am very passionate about everything around writing the actual software.
For me, version control with git is a pivotal part of handling any software project, and I worked a lot with continuous integration tools such GitLab CI/CD. Thanks to an excellent course at the TUM, I know a lot about REST, Microservices, Docker, Protocol Buffers, and Spring. All these concepts, frameworks, and tools can help us as programmers enormously when writing, deploying and maintaining software.

Automated Implementation of Windows-related Security-Configuration Guides

Patrick Stöckle, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Overall Acceptance Rate: 37 of 312 submissions (12%).

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Automated Identification of Security-Relevant Configuration Settings Using NLP

Patrick Stöckle, Theresa Wasserer, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Overall Acceptance Rate: 128 of 562 submissions (23%).

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Hardening with Scapolite: A DevOps-based Approach for Improved Authoring and Testing of Security-Configuration Guides in Large-Scale Organizations

Patrick Stöckle, Ionuț Pruteanu, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: Twelveth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY)

Overall Acceptance Rate: 65 of 357 submissions (18%).

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Better Safe Than Sorry! Automated Identification of Breaking Security-Configuration Rules

Patrick Stöckle, Michael Sammereier, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST)

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Automatisierte Identifikation von sicherheitsrelevanten Konfigurationseinstellungen mittels NLP

Patrick Stöckle, Theresa Wasserer, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: Software Engineering 2023

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Sichere Konfigurationshärtung laufender Systeme

Patrick Stöckle, Michael Sammereier, Bernd Grobauer, Alexander Pretschner

In: Sicherheit in vernetzten Systemen: 30. DFN-Konferenz

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CIS Microsoft Edge Benchmark v2.0.0

Caleb Eifert, William Ferguson, Johannes Goerlich, Daniel Jasiak, Patrick Stöckle

In: Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks

Gitlab CI/CD Optimization

Date: 24.07.2024

Event: Siemens XO Community of Architects Deep Dive (Intranet Only)

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A Holistic Approach for Security Configuration

Date: 28.06.2024

Event: PhD Defense

Building Lean and Mean: Using Minimized Container Images to Improve the Security of Containerized Applications and Speed Up CI/CD Pipelines

Date: 28.05.2024

Event: Siemens PaSS-Time Series (Intranet Only)

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Better Safe Than Sorry! Automated Identification of Breaking Security-Configuration Rules

Date: 15.05.2023

Event: AST'23

Automatisierte Identifikation von sicherheitsrelevanten Konfigurationseinstellungen mittels NLP

Date: 24.02.2023

Event: SE'23

Sichere Konfigurationshärtung laufender Systeme

Date: 09.02.2023

Event: 30. DFN-Konferenz "Sicherheit in vernetzten Systemen"

Automated Identification of Security-Relevant Configuration Settings Using NLP

Date: 11.10.2022

Event: ASE'22

Hardening with Scapolite

Date: 25.04.2022

Event: CODASPY'22

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Towards deriving automated implementation & verification mechanisms from a single machine-readable requirements specification

Date: 02.05.2019

Event: SCAPv2 Workshop

Summer '25

Practical Course: Container Security

University: Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Role: Lecturer

Winter '24/25

Practicum of the lecture Sicherheit in verteilten Systemen

University: HM Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences

Role: Lecturer

Summer '22

Security Engineering

University: Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Role: Leading Teaching Assistant

Winter '20/21

Advanced Topics of Software Engineering

University: Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Role: Teaching Assistant

Seminar: Software Quality

University: Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Role: Teaching Assistant

Cloud Security and DevSecOps Automation (GCSA)

SANS/GIAC

• I'm a dog owner since 2021. I love to spend time outside with my wife and our dog on walks within the city of Munich and hikes outside the city, for example, in the Alps. 🐕🥾⛰
• I love to go to museums and visit exhibitions. 🖼 My favorite permanent exhibition in the city of Munich is the Lenbachhaus, but I really like the temporary exhibitions of the Kunsthalle.
• Another hobby of mine is going to theaters and operas. 🎭 Here in Munich, my favorite place is the Gärtnerplatztheater for operas and the Volkstheater for plays.
• I really like playing soccer.⚽️ Furthermore, I like to participate in running events like the Munich Marathon; I was running the 10K in 2019, half-marathon in 2022, and the marathon in 2023. 🏃🏻‍♂️