About Me
Hi, I'm Benedikt. I am a Principal Systems Engineer from Germany.
Born in 1989, after my A-Levels and military service in 2010, I worked for several years as a freelance software developer, mainly creating web and database applications in the areas of personal management, marketing, photography, and logistics.
After my bachelor thesis in 2014, I started to work in academia at Chair of Informatics 2 in the Theory of Hybrid Systems Group headed by Prof. Dr. Ábrahám, where I focussed on the development of control strategies for hybrid electric vehicles as well as teaching activities. In September 2015, I started working at the Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems (COMSYS) in the network architectures group headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wehrle, where I finished my master thesis in the domain of HTTP/2 in 2018.
I joined Cloudflare in 2018. Today, I'm a Principal Systems Engineer and the creator of Turnstile — Cloudflare's privacy-preserving CAPTCHA alternative. I also lead development of browser-based bot detection systems.
My interests include: distributed systems, web performance, browser networking, data-science, internet protocols, IT-security and privacy, and evolutionary algorithms.
Patents
Transparent inspection of responses from origin servers to identify protected data
US Patent No 10733307 (August 2020)
Publications
Let The Right One In: Attestation as a Usable CAPTCHA Alternative.
Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022)
Distributed Configuration, Authorization and Management in the Cloud-based Internet of Things.
16th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications
Is the Web ready for HTTP/2 Server Push?
14th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CoNEXT '18)
A QoE Perspective on HTTP/2 Server Push.
ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Workshop on QoE-based Analysis and Management of Data Communication Networks (Internet-QoE 2017)
How HTTP/2 Pushes the Web: An Empirical Study of HTTP/2 Server Push.
IFIP NETWORKING'17
Two CEGAR-Based Approaches for the Safety Verification of PLC-Controlled Plants.
Information Systems Frontiers 2016: 1-26
Learning-based control strategies for hybrid electric vehicles.
CCA 2015: 1722-1728
A Genetic Algorithm based Control Strategy for the Energy Management Problem in PHEVs.
GCAI 2015: 196-214
A CEGAR Tool for the Reachability Analysis of PLC-Controlled Plants Using Hybrid Automata.
Formalisms for Reuse and Systems Integration 2015: 55-78
See also: dblp, Google Scholar, ResearchGate
Cloudflare Blog
Selected posts from the Cloudflare Blog about my work on Turnstile and bot detection:
Turnstile Ephemeral IDs enable correlation of abusive behavior beyond IP addresses for fraud detection use cases.
Turnstile Pre-Clearance issues clearance cookies so WAF challenges can protect browser fetch/XHR flows.
Turnstile General Availability announcement — free CAPTCHA replacement with Managed mode and lessons from beta.
Turnstile beta announcement: privacy-first CAPTCHA alternative using non-intrusive browser challenges.
Introducing Managed Challenge as a rotating challenge platform to reduce CAPTCHAs while maintaining security.
Awards, Honors & Certifications
- Master Thesis Award 2018, Fachgruppe Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme (KuVS), Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
- 1st Place it-talents.de Code Competition December 2018
- Best Thesis Award 2017, Verein zur Förderung von Forschung und Lehre im Bereich Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme (FOLKS e.V.)
- 1st Place it-talents.de Code Competition October 2017
- 3rd Place it-talents.de Code Competition February 2017
- Univention Absolventenpreis (Bachelor Thesis Award) 2016
- Google Security Hall of Fame 2011 / Google Vulnerability Reward Recipient
- Certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance)
- Certified Software Tester (ISTQB)
University Projects, Theses & Seminars
- Master Thesis (2018): Demystifying the Performance of HTTP/2 Server Push
- Aachen 2025: Organ Challenge C++ Kinect Game, Demo [German]
- Medicine Project Thesis (2016): Robust Patient Pseudonym Extraction during Automatic Calibration in Low-Cost Photogrammetry
- Research Focus Class (2015): Privacy under Attack – Online Crowdinvestments: Divestment of Privacy?
- Seminar Paper (2015): Structure-Based Comparison of Biomolecules, Seminar on Bioinformatics Algorithms
- Seminar Paper (2014): Connecting the IoT: Opportunities for Using SDN and NFV to Realize Flexible LTE Network Architectures
- Bachelor Thesis (2014): Distributed Authorization Management for Secure Sensor Data in the Cloud
- Seminar Paper (2013): Bringing Healthcare to the Cloud: Security and Privacy Challenges
- Proseminar (2011): The PageRank Algorithm
Past Projects
GeneiAL
C++ Genetic Algorithm Library – I am the maintainer of this open-source library for evolutionary algorithms.
netray.io
Internet-wide HTTP/2 measurements – Involved in large-scale measurements of HTTP/2 adoption across the web.
Nine Men's Morris
Challenge my AI-powered Nine men's morris game engines.
TSP-Solver
Traveling Salesman Problem solver – A challenge implementation for optimization problems.