Research Agenda

Our research focuses on software and systems security. Despite efforts and improvements in bug discovery techniques, some exploitable vulnerabilities will remain. We target techniques that both enable developers to discover and remove bugs and make programs resilient against the exploitation of unknown or unpatched vulnerabilities.

To discover bugs we propose (i) sanitization techniques that enforce a security property such as memory or type safety; given concrete program input, our sanitizers then flag any property violations and (ii) fuzzing techniques that leverage static and dynamic analysis to create program inputs to explore program areas that are not yet covered through existing test cases. To protect against exploitable vulnerabilities, we focus on control-flow integrity using specific language semantics, enforcing type integrity, and protecting selective data. Under this premise, we focus on compiler-based, runtime-based, and language-based protection mechanisms and security policies that increase the resilience of applications against attacks (in the presence of software vulnerabilities). All prototypes are released as open-source and we release talks on YouTube.

Key Topics

software security, system security, sanitization, software testing, fuzzing mitigation, fault isolation, compartmentalization.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Meet the members of the HexHive


Mathias Payer
Associate Professor
           

Marcel Busch
Post Doc
       

Qiang Liu
Post Doc
         

Qinying Wang
Post Doc
   

Nicolas Badoux
PhD Candidate
       

Luca Di Bartolomeo
PhD Candidate
     

Florian Hofhammer
PhD Candidate
 

Tao Lyu
PhD Candidate
     

Zhiyao Feng
PhD Candidate
   

Chibin Zhang
PhD Candidate
   

Philipp Mao
PhD Candidate
   

Han Zheng
PhD Candidate
     

Solène Husseini
PhD Student
   

Rafaila Galanopoulou
PhD Student
     

Dariia Kharytonova
MSc Research Scholar
 

Rokhaya Fall
MSc Research Scholar
   

Zheyu Ma
Visiting Student
   

Zezhong Ren
Visiting Student
 

Natascha Fontana
Administrative Assistant

Graduated PhD students and Post Docs


Flavio Toffalini
Post Doc, fall '21 to fall '24
First job: asst prof at RUB

Andrés Sanchez
Researcher, fall '19 to spring '24
First job: Amazon

Adrian Herrera
ANU PhD '24
(co-advised by Tony Hosking)
First job: Interrupt Labs

Atri Bhattacharyya
EPFL PhD spring '24
First job: Oracle Labs

Gwangmu Lee
Post Doc, spring '22 to spring '24
First job: CSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Ahmad Hazimeh
EPFL PhD spring '24
First job: BugScale

Prashast Srivastava
Purdue PhD spring '23
First job: post doc at Columbia

Derrick McKee
Purdue PhD spring '22
First job: MIT LL

Daniele Antonioli
Post Doc, spring '20 to fall '21
First job: asst prof at EURECOM

Hui Peng
Purdue PhD spring '21
First job: Baidu Research

Priyam Biswas
Purdue PhD fall '20
First job: Intel Research

Yuseok Jeon
Purdue PhD summer '20
First job: asst prof at UNIST

Naif Almakhdhub
Purdue PhD spring '20
(co-advised by Saurabh Bagchi)
First job: asst prof at KSU

Abe Clements
Purdue PhD spring '19
(co-advised by Saurabh Bagchi)
First job: Sandia National Labs

Kyriakos Ispoglou
Purdue PhD spring '19
First job: Google

Nathan Burow
Purdue PhD fall '18
First job: MIT LL

Terry Hsu
Purdue PhD spring '18
(co-advised by Patrick Eugster)
First job: Apple

Scott Carr
Purdue PhD spring '17
First job: Northrop Grumman

Ahmed Hussein
Purdue PhD fall '16
(co-advised by Tony Hosking)
First job: Huawei

Past visitors and researchers:

  • Zurab Tsinadze (MSc research scholar, fall '22 to spring '24)
  • Duo Xu (MSc research scholar, fall '21 to fall '23)
  • Yishun Zeng (visiting PhD student from Tsinghua University, spring '23 and fall '23)
  • Qinying Wang (visiting PhD student from Zhejiang University, spring '23 and fall '23)
  • Zhiyuan Jiang (virtual visiting PhD student from NUDT fall '21 to spring '23)
  • Jianhao Xu (visiting PhD student from Nanjing University, fall '22 and spring '23)
  • Manuel Egele (visiting faculty during his sabbatical from BU, fall '21 and spring '22)
  • Hossein Moghaddas (MSc research scholar, fall '21 and spring '22)
  • Han Zheng (visiting MSc student from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, spring '22 and fall '22)
  • Qiang Liu (visiting PhD student from Zhejiang University, fall '21 and spring '22)
  • Majid Salehi (visiting PhD student from KU Leuven, fall '21)
  • Anil Kurmus (visiting researcher, fall '19)
  • Sushant Dinesh (PhD student/MSc thesis, graduated spring '19)
  • Alessandro Di Federico (visiting PhD student, fall '16)

Contact

Address:  EPFL IC IINFCOM HEXHIVE   
Bâtiment BC 160
Station 14
CH-1015 Lausanne
Office:BC 160 (Mathias)
Lab:BC 159


Directions: You can reach the BC building by metro m1 (stop "EPFL") or bus 701 (stop "Parc scientifique").
There is (very) limited parking next to BC. The HexHive offices are on the first floor of BC in the east.