Contact Details
| Email address | |
| PGP key | |
| Phone | +31 20 598 4259 |
| Office | 11A-27 |
| Directions | https://www.vusec.net/directions |
| Mailing address | Cristiano Giuffrida Dept of Computer Science NU building, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1111 1081 HV, Amsterdam The Netherlands |
Research
I am an Associate Professor at the VU Amsterdam. I co-lead the VUSec group with Herbert Bos and Erik van der Kouwe.
I received my MEng from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2007 and my PhD from the VU Amsterdam in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum. I was awarded the Roger Needham Award at EuroSys for the best PhD thesis in Computer Systems in Europe and the Dennis M. Ritchie Award at SOSP for the best PhD thesis in Computer Systems worldwide in 2015, a VENI grant (the Dutch Equivalent of a NSF CAREER Award, PhD+3) in 2017, a VMWare Early Career Faculty Award in 2020, a EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award in 2022, and the Dutch Prize for ICT Research in 2023.
My research interests span across several aspects of systems, with a focus on systems security, reliability, and availability.
I am currently active in a number of systems areas, ranging from live update, automatic error recovery, and software testing to memory error containment, side channels, and hardware vulnerabilities.
Selected Publications
See here for the full list of publications.
Teaching
- Binary and Malware Analysis, MSc.
- Advanced Operating Systems, MSc.
- Hardware Security, MSc.
- Operating Systems, BSc.
- Compiler Construction, BSc.
Service
Program Chair
- DIMVA
- EuroSec
Artifact Evaluation Chair
- USENIX Security
- EuroSys
PC Member
- SOSP
- OSDI
- EuroSys
- USENIX ATC
- S&P
- USENIX Security
- CCS
- NDSS
- RAID
- DIMVA
Reviewer
- CSUR
- TMC
- TIFS
- TDSC
- TOPS
Profiles
News
Feb, 2023
Apr, 2022
- During EuroSys, I was awarded the EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award [Link]. April 7, 2022, Rennes, FR.
Mar, 2022
- Our USENIX SEC “BHI / Spectre-BHB” paper hit the news [Link].
Aug, 2021
- Our “Rage Against the Machine Clear” paper won the Distinguished Paper Award at the USENIX Security Symposium [Link].
Aug, 2021
- Our CCS “BlindSide” paper won the Pwnie Award for Most Innovative Research at Black Hat USA [Link].
Apr, 2021
- Our ASPLOS “Debug^2” paper won the Distinguished Paper Award [Link].
Apr, 2021
- Our USENIX SEC “SMASH” paper hit the news [Link].
Jan, 2021
- Our S&P “TRRespass” paper received a IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention.
Dec, 2020
- Our S&P “TRRespass” paper won the Pwnie Award for Most Innovative Research at Black Hat USA [Link].
Sep, 2020
- Our S&P “RIDL” paper won the Dutch Cyber Security Research Award [Link].
Sep, 2020
- Our CCS “BlindSide” paper hit the news [Link].
Jun, 2020
- Our S&P “CrossTalk” paper hit the news [Link].
May, 2020
- Our S&P paper “TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh” won the Best Paper Award [Link].
Mar, 2020
- I have been awarded a VMware Early Career Faculty Award.
Mar, 2020
- Our S&P “TRRespass” paper hit the news [Link].
Sep, 2019
- Our S&P “NetCAT” paper hit the news [Link].
May, 2019
- Our S&P paper “RIDL: Rogue In-flight Data Load” hit the news [Link].
May, 2019
- Our S&P paper “Exploiting Correcting Codes: On the Effectiveness of ECC Memory Against Rowhammer Attacks” won the Best Practical Paper Award [Link].
September, 2018
- Our RAID paper “Defeating Software Mitigations against Rowhammer: A Surgical Precision Hammer” won the Best Paper Award [Link].
May, 2018
- Our S&P paper “Grand Pwning Unit: Accelerating Microarchitectural Attacks with the GPU” hit the news [Link].
March, 2018
- Our NDSS paper “ASLR on the Line: Practical Cache Attacks on the MMU” won the Dutch Cyber Security Research Award [Link].
November, 2017
- Our CCS paper “Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms” won the CSAW Applied Research Best Paper Award [Link].
August, 2017
- Our NDSS paper “ASLR on the Line: Practical Cache Attacks on the MMU” and our CCS paper “Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms” won 2 Pwnie Awards at Black Hat USA (Most Innovative Research, Best Privilege Escalation Bug) [Links: 1 | 2].
July, 2017
- I have been awarded a VENI grant (the Dutch equivalent of a NSF CAREER award in the US, PhD+3) for my PantaRhei project proposal [Link].
April, 2017
- Our CCS paper “Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms” won the Dutch Cyber Security Research Award [Link].
February, 2017
- Our NDSS paper “ASLR on the Line: Practical Cache Attacks on the MMU” hit the news [Link].
October, 2016
- Our S&P paper “Dedup Est Machina: Memory Deduplication as an Advanced Exploitation Vector”, our USENIX Security paper “Flip Feng Shui: Hammering a Needle in the Software Stack”, and our CCS paper “Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms” hit the news [Links: 1 | 2 | 3].
August, 2016
- Our S&P paper “Dedup Est Machina: Memory Deduplication as an Advanced Exploitation Vector” won the Pwnie Award for Most Innovative Research at Black Hat USA [Links: 1 | 2 | 3]. August 3, 2016, Las Vegas, NV, USA.
June, 2016
- Our paper “OSIRIS: Efficient and Consistent Recovery of Compartmentalized Operating Systems” was selected for the Best paper session at DSN. June 28-July 1, 2016, Toulouse, France.
October, 2015
- During SOSP, I was awarded the Dennis M. Ritchie Award for the best PhD thesis in Computer Systems worldwide
[Links: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7]. October 5, 2015, Monterey, CA, USA.
April, 2015
- During EuroSys, I was awarded the Roger Needham Award for the best PhD thesis in Computer Systems in Europe
[Links: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6]. April 22, 2015, Bordeaux, FR.
June, 2014
- Invited talk at USENIX ATC 2014: “Back to the Future: Fault-tolerant Live Update with Time-traveling State Transfer” [Talk]. June 19-20, 2014, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
January, 2014
- Our paper “Evaluating Distortion in Fault Injection Experiments” awarded Best paper at HASE. January 9-11, 2014, Miami, FL, USA.
November, 2013
- Our paper “Back to the Future: Fault-tolerant Live Update with Time-traveling State Transfer” awarded Best student paper at LISA. November 3, 2013, Washington, D.C., USA.
June, 2012
- Summer intership in the Linux kernel memory team at Google, Mountain View, CA, USA.