Franziska Boenisch

Franziska Boenisch

Faculty @ CISPA

Research focus:
Private and Secure ML

Home

I am Franziska Boenisch, tenure track faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. At CISPA, I am co-leading the SprintML lab for Secure, Private, Robust, INterpretable, and Trustworthy Machine Learning. Before, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence supervised by Prof. Dr. Nicolas Papernot. Prior to joining Vector, I was a PhD candidate at Freie University Berlin and a research assosiate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC).

I am Hiring!

Currently, I am looking for PhDs, Postdocs, and Research Interns. If you are excited about working on trustworthy ML, please drop me a mail with your CV, current transcript, and a motivation why you want to apply to my group.

Research

My research focus lies at the intersection of Security, Privacy, and Machine Learning from the perspective of individual users and data owners. Since September 2025, this research is supported by an ERC Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council.

Research has shown that trained ML models do not necessarily provide privacy for the underlying training datasets, as some attacks allow to restore (aspects of) the training data from the model parameters (e.g. model inversion attacks), or others allow to find out if an individual data point was included in the training dataset or not (membership inference attacks). Both can be harmful for the privacy of the individuals whose data is represented in the training dataset. Therefore, protecting privacy in ML models is a crucial task. I’m currently mainly researching in the area of Differential Privacy, a mathematical framework that provides formal privacy guarantees. I’m also looking into the practical evaluation of privacy loss and into the identification of potential sources for privacy leakage in privacy preserving technologies. Identifying such pain points allows us to develop a better understanding on why practical privacy stays behind the strong theoretical guarantees. This helps in adapting and extending theoretical frameworks, their implementations and their integration into real-worlds systems for enhanced privacy in practice.

Initiatives

Beyond my research, I am passionately organizing a European Hackathon Championship in AI and Cybersecurity. This is a multi-national event to promote the topics of AI and Cybersecurity. In total, we will be having five local rounds of hackathons with challenges inspired by my research and implemented by my lab. The winners from the local rounds will then be invited to join the Grand Final in July 2026 to compete for the title for European Champion. If you want to learn more about the past events, you can check out our webpage, or read what drives me.

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