Alex Sabau, M. Sc. RWTH

About me

Welcome to my page!

I am Alex Sabau, an enthusiastic software engineer with years of experience in software engineering and architecture.

Please check my main research interests below. I am always open to potential research collaboration. If you are interested in working with me, feel free to shoot me a mail. :-)

All the best!

Research interests

My main research focus are methods and tools to support security by design early on, mainly with an emphasize of architecture modeling and documentation. This includes:

  • security by design
  • secure software design
  • quality assessment of architecture models
  • complexity reduction of complex models

Industry cooperations

  • Feb. 2020 - Jun. 2022: apoBank eG

Talks

  • A Guided Modeling Approach for Secure System Design. ICSA 2024, Hyderabad, India, June 4-8, 2024
  • Ein Recommender-Ansatz für den Entwurf sicherer Softwaresysteme. OODACH 2024, Linz, Austria, September 19-20, 2024
  • SecuRe - An Approach to Recommending Security Design Patterns. ICSA 2025, Odense, Denmark, 31 March - 4 April, 2025

Awards

  • ICSA’25 Best Poster Award for the poster SecuRe - An Approach to Recommending Security Design Patterns

Activities

  • Founder and Spokesman of the MABSS working group - “Modellierung, Analyse und Bewertung sicherer Softwarearchitekturen” (Modeling, Analysis and Assessment of Secure Software Architectures) as part of the Architecture Division of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).
  • Web content manager of the Gesellschaft für Informatik Regional Group for Computer Science Aachen (RIA)
Picture of Alex Sabau
Alex Sabau
Research Assistant

Research projects

An Exploration Plattform for Microservice Applications

The microservice architecture pattern is a software architecture pattern that structures a software application into many individual services that are closely aligned with business capabilities. To be able to explore the effect of changes in a software architecture on the quality of the software system, one usually needs a system under test. These are often missing in the microservice context and can only be used with high information loss by software architecture reconstruction. In this research project we try to develop a platform that allows explorations on microservice architectures and thus does not require the existence of microservice applications and their reconstruction for research on microservice systems.

SCAM - Security-Centric Architecture Modelling

It is impossible to imagine today's world without software: whether it is smartphones, with which we carry a powerful computer with us almost everywhere and are connected to the Internet around the clock, highly scalable cloud applications that we use in our everyday working lives, airports, hospitals, supermarkets - the list of areas in which software is used in one form or another seems endless. Being surrounded by software, most of which being connected to the internet all the time, i.e. 24/7 potential vulnerabilities for outside intruders and attackers, emphesizes the need for highly secure software systems. In order to cope with the high complexity introduced by solutions of security requirements in software architecture, appropriate modelling techniques are required. Although some approaches to security modeling have been developed in recent years, it is still difficult and cumbersome to design, maintain, and evaluate the security architecture of a software system. This is partly because security modeling and architecture modeling belong together, since security solutions can affect the architecture of the software system, but they are handled as separate topics. For instance, threat modeling can be used to identify potential threats in a software system and to design countermeasures for these threats. However, looking at the architecture description documents after the fact, it is not apparent what solutions have been incorporated to address threats, making it much more difficult to evaluate the security architecture of a software system. This research project aims to develop and test new approaches to get a better view of security from an architectural perspective.

Publications

Latest publications:

  • Alex Sabau, Dominik Lammers, Horst Lichter (2025)
    SecuRe - An Approach to Recommending Security Design Patterns. In CoRR, Vol. abs/2501.14973.
    DOI URL
  • Alex Sabau, Dominik Lammers, Horst Lichter (2025)
    SecuRe - An Approach to Recommending Security Design Patterns. In 2025 IEEE 22st International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) (to be published), Odense, Denmark, Mar 31 - Apr 4, IEEE.
  • Timo Langstrof, Alex Sabau (2024)
    The current state of security - Insights from the German software industry. In Computing Research Repository (CoRR), Vol. 2402.
    DOI PDF
All Publications of SWC
More publications (6)

Supervisor for thesis projects

Open thesis topics (3)

Current thesis topics (3)

Completed thesis projects (22)

Latest completed projects:

More thesis projects supervised by me

Latest courses

Summer semester 2025

Winter semester 2024/2025

More courses supervised by me