Manuel Benz - Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder at CodeShield

Manuel Benz

Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder at CodeShield

Paderborn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Manuel Benz is a software leader and CTO with nine years of experience combining academic research and product engineering to build security-focused developer tools. As Co-Founder and CTO of CodeShield he helps cloud teams rapidly detect IAM privilege escalations, translating deep program-analysis expertise into a practical SaaS. He is the lead maintainer of the Soot static-analysis framework and has contributed significant backend and compatibility fixes to widely used projects like Soot and FlowDroid, reflecting strong Java bytecode and Android static-analysis skills. His PhD work at Universität Paderborn bridged static and dynamic analysis to uncover vulnerabilities and malicious behavior in Java, informing both research and production tooling. Prior roles at Fraunhofer SIT and SAP add experience in cryptographic API misuse detection and enterprise software development. Based in Paderborn, Germany, he blends rigorous academic depth with hands-on system architecture and secure-by-design product delivery.

9 years of coding experience

2 years of employment as a software developer

Technischen Universität Darmstadt

German, English

Github Skills (12)

javas10

code-optimization10

maintenance10

static-analysis10

java-bytecode10

bytecode-manipulation10

soot10

optimisation10

java10

optimization10

android-development9

maven8

Programming languages (8)

TypeScriptJavaShellJavaScriptHTMLSwiftPythonKotlin

Github contributions (5)

soot-oss/soot

Feb 2017 - Dec 2021

Soot - A Java optimization framework

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & System Architect

Contributions:352 commits, 188 PRs, 424 pushes in 4 years 11 months

Contributions summary:Manuel contributed to the Soot framework, focusing on Java bytecode manipulation and optimization. Their work involved backporting Java 8 methods to Java 7, fixing legacy handling of macOS runtime jars, and refactoring code for Maven standards. They also addressed a critical issue in the DexFileProvider related to multiple DEX files and improved code validation. This indicates their contributions are centered around maintaining and improving the core functionality and compatibility of the Soot framework, likely impacting various components such as the core processing logic, analysis framework, and related tools.

java-optimization-frameworksootjava-optimizationoptimization-frameworkoptimization

secure-software-engineering/FlowDroid

Sep 2018 - Jul 2019

FlowDroid Static Data Flow Tracker

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:12 commits, 3 PRs, 5 pushes in 9 months

Contributions summary:Manuel primarily contributed to improving the FlowDroid static data flow tracker. They addressed issues in the code optimization and constant propagation modules, including resolving exceptions and fixing indentation. Additionally, the user made modifications to the DeadCodeEliminator and CallbackAnalyzer, removing callgraph edges and enhancing the analysis of callbacks. Their work involved Java code and modifications related to static analysis of Android applications.

trackerdata-flow-trackerstatic-datadata-flowflowdroid

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