Faculty
I am Cristian, a tenure-track faculty at CISPA – Helmholtz Center for Information Security. I completed my PhD in the Software Lab group at TU Darmstadt, Germany under the supervision of Michael Pradel. Prior to that, I obtained my Master's from EIT Digital, a European double degree Master's program. Concretely, I studied one year at the University of Twente, Netherlands and one year at University of Trento, Italy. I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Politehnica University of Timișoara, Romania. My core research interest is in system security, at the intersection of software/web security, software engineering and programming languages. One of the central goals of my research group is to directly contribute to the open-source ecosystem: either by building tools that can be used by practitioners or by uncovering security vulnerabilities in real systems/projects.
Program Analysis for Vulnerability Detection
For registration, please apply for this seminar through the central seminar assignment system.
Program analysis is a mature research area at the intersection of programming languages, formal methods, and software engineering. One of its main applications is automatic vulnerability detection. However, the complexity of modern systems is overwhelming and the vulnerabilities to be detected are increasingly sophisticated. To account for these particularities, many recent approaches advocate for lightweight program analysis techniques or hybrid methods, i.e., static and dynamic analysis. This seminar explores the trade-offs involved in designing a program analysis that scales to analyzing the security of real systems. In this seminar, we will discuss recent research papers in the area in a reading group format. Each week, one student will present papers covering a given topic, followed by a discussion. All participants are expected to actively participate in the discussion by asking questions.
Instructor: Cristian-Alexandru Staicu
Time: To be decided
Location: Zoom (Disclaimer).
To be decided.
The final grade is an aggregate of the following parts, both presentation and final report are mandatory:
Please find below a set of useful materials for the seminar:
Joint Advances in Web Security
For registration, please apply for this seminar through the central seminar assignment system.
In this seminar, students will learn to present, discuss, and summarize papers in different areas of Web security. The seminar is taught as a combination of a reading group with weekly meetings and a regular seminar, where you have to write a seminar paper. Specifically, each student will get a single topic assigned to them, consisting of two papers (a lead and follow-up paper).
For the weekly meetings, all students have to have read the lead paper and must state at least three questions before the meeting. In the meeting, the assigned student will present the follow-up paper (20 minute presentation + 10 minute Q/A). Afterward, the entire group will discuss both papers.
Moreover, each student will write a seminar paper on the topic assigned to them, for which the two papers on the topic serve as the starting point.
Each seminar paper is meant to provide a summary/categorization of research papers in the associated area. Depending on the topic, the paper should be structured in a logical fashion. For example, assume the topic of Service Workers. One might classify the seminar paper based on security considerations for Service Workers, attacks against Service Workers, and attacks enabled through Service Workers. Each section should demonstrate the state of the art in the area. Finally, the paper should, where possible, discuss limitations and open issues given the previously conducted work.
All seminar papers are due on February 11, 2022. Based on your submission, you will receive feedback within one week and have until March 4, 2022 to improve your paper. The paper grading will be on the final version. Note that the first submission must already be sufficient to pass. If you submit a half-baked version of the paper, you will flunk the course.
Each paper must use the provided template. It must not be longer than 8 pages, not counting references and appendices. Note that appendices are not meant to provide information that is absolutely necessary to understand the paper, but rather to provide auxiliary material. Papers can be shorter, but in general the provided page limit is a good indicator of how long a paper should be.
The list of topics, papers, and dates for the respective meetings can be found here.