I am currently pursuing my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Lucas Davi at the University of Duisburg-Essen. My primary research interests include:
Here are some other websites about my research:
The focus of my research is to take and apply program analysis techniques to identify security issues or detect attacks. Two give a couple of examples, I worked on a project where we used taint tracking inside of the Ethereum Virtual Machine to identify attacks on Ethereum smart contracts. In my master thesis we leveraged a points-to analysis at compile time to introduce runtime security checks that verify that a memory write always targets an object that complies to the points-to analysis. While, most of my research has focused on attack detection I am also interested in vulnerability detection and try to stay up-to-date with the current techniques in this space (i.e., fuzzing, symbolic execution, static analyzers).
Teerex I supervised a Master thesis on symbolic execution of SGX enclaves. This master thesis turned out to have marvelous results. We identified a couple of vulnerabilities in production SGX enclaves and identified problematic code patterns that typically lead to vulnerabilities.
Sereum In a collaboration with NEC labs we built a dynamic analysis tool for Ethereum smart contracts. I implemented a taint tracking engine inside of the go-ethereum EVM bytecode interpreter. Based on this taint tracking engine we were able to build a dynamic detector for the infamous reentrancy attacks (this the DAO hack thing). The both fun and unfun part of this project was to evaluate on the vast dataset that is the Ethereum blockchain. You have all kinds of scalability issues when evaluating by re-executing basically the whole blockchain (the raw data can be found here). Interestingly we were also able to identify potential new attack patterns based off our analysis of the detected potential attacks, for which we introduced example attacks
ANANAS Previously I worked on dynamic analysis of Android applications. In the malware-lab of the FH Hagenberg Secure Informations Systems we started a project that provides a dynamic analysis platform for Android applications. This resulted in my first publication. Here we built a dynamic analysis platform for analyzing android malware with all the nicities you would expect from a malware sandbox: system call logging, network traffic monitoring, preparing the environment with fake user data, simulating random user interaction and so on. We also used TaintDroid, but this was too much of a trouble and mostly not worth the effort.
Dynamic Analysis Projects Later I also patched Taintdroid to contain taint sinks/sources/tags for cryptography APIs, which can result in insights how an application uses cryptography to protect user data.
I also started a small project that does compile time function call instrumentation in LLVM (you could call it aspect oriented programming). It's focused on analysis and fault injection though and does come with a significant overhead. The project is now dead/unmaintained.
LLWIT I did my master thesis at the IAIK Secure Systems groups, where I built upon the results of the Write Integrity Testing (WIT) paper, which I implemented within LLVM for Linux. This is am exploit mitigation primarily intended to thwart data-oriented attacks, but also covers many control data attacks. I then evaluated WIT on the CGC dataset (only somewhat successfully). However, this evaluation on the CGC dataset showed that there are many issues when implementing a security mitigation.