Faculty
Michael Backes
Founding Director and CEO
Founding Director and CEO
2023: ACM Fellow
2019: Karl-Heinz Beckurts Prize
2018: IEEE Fellow
2018: Honorary Doctorate
2017: NSA Cybersecurity Research Award
2017: IEEE Golden Core Award
2017: CNIL-INRIA Privacy Award
2014: ERC Synergy Grant
2014: IEEE Outstanding Community Service Award
2011: IEEE Outstanding Community Service Award
2009: MIT TR35
2009: ERC Starting Grant
2008: IBM Faculty Award
2007: Fellow of the German Max Planck Society
2005: IBM Outstanding Achievement Award for Linking Formal Verification and Cryptography
2005: IBM Research Division Award for contributions to Web Services Security
2004: Microsoft Award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies
2004: IBM Outstanding Achievement Award for contributions to Enterprise Privacy Architectures
2002: VDI Diploma Thesis Award
2001: Scholarship of the DFG graduate studies program ”Quality Guarantees for Computer Systems”
Michael Backes is the founding director and CEO of the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.
In his research, Prof. Backes focuses primarily on trustworthy methods for machine learning, on novel approaches for protecting personal data, and on universal solutions for software and system security. His research results have shaped these scientific fields internationally, as is evidenced by over 300 peer-reviewed and highly cited publications in renowned international journals and conference proceedings.
His research has earned him internationally renowned scientific awards and honors, in particular the ERC Synergy Grant, which is Europe's most highly endowed EU group research award, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize, an ERC Starting Grant, the Caspar Bowden Privacy Award, the IEEE and ACM Fellowship, as well as various Career Awards and Best Paper Awards.
His research results have regularly been translated into highly innovative applications that have brought him widespread attention beyond the scientific community. In particular, Prof. Backes was the first German to receive the MIT TR35 Award, which recognized him as one of the top 35 researchers and innovators in the world under the age of 35 (across disciplines) whose “accomplishments are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it”.
Michael Backes is regularly listed in rankings as one of Germany's most important IT personalities. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Université de Lorraine and is both honorary citizen and future ambassador of the city of St. Ingbert.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
The Art of (Mis)alignment: How Fine-Tuning Methods Effectively Misalign and Realign LLMs in Post-Training
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Sparse Models, Sparse Safety: Unsafe Routes in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
AAAI 2026 Workshop on AI Governance
Frequency-Domain Model Fingerprinting for Image Autoregressive Models
ICLR 2026 Workshop: Principled Design for Trustworthy AI
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
InferPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Rethinking Assessments of Prompt Injection Attacks
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
Adjacent Words, Divergent Intents: Jailbreaking Large Language Models via Task Concurrency
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
Finding and Reactivating Post-Trained LLMs’ Hidden Safety Mechanisms
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Breaking Agents: Compromising Autonomous LLM Agents Through Malfunction Amplification