When: May 16, 2025, 09:30 – 12:15

Where: VU Campus, NU building, room NU-4A25

Directions to NU building: https://vusec.net/directions

This mini workshop features a strong line-up of leading systems security researchers from around the world. The event is freely accessible to everyone on a first come, first serve basis.

Speakers

Workshop program (May 16 at VU, NU-4A25)

09:30	Coffee and tea
09:55	Opening by Cristiano Giuffrida (AMSec)
10:00	Speaker: Cristian Cadar Title: Program Analysis for Safe and Secure Software Evolution Abstract: Constant evolution is an inherent property of modern software systems. Software evolves to implement new features, adapt to new hardware and platforms, fix bugs and security vulnerabilities, or improve non-functional properties such as performance and energy consumption. While these changes have an overall positive impact, they are also responsible for a large number of critical bugs and security attacks. Program analysis techniques such as fuzzing and symbolic execution have shown great promise in terms of improving the reliability and security of software. However, program analysis techniques are typically designed to be applied to entire programs and can struggle to keep up with the high pace of modern software development. In this talk, I will discuss some of our research efforts directed toward making program analysis more agile, and reflect on remaining challenges and opportunities. Bio: Cristian Cadar is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Software Reliability Group (http://srg.doc.ic.ac.uk), working on automatic techniques for increasing the reliability and security of software systems. Cristian's research has been recognised by several prestigious awards, including the EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Award, HVC Award, BCS Roger Needham Award, IEEE TCSE New Directions Award, Humboldt Research Award, and two test of time awards. Many of the research techniques he co-authored have been open-sourced and used in both academia and industry. In particular, he is co-author and maintainer of the KLEE symbolic execution system, a popular system with a large user base. Cristian has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and undergraduate and Master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
10:45	Speaker: Pramod Bhatotia Title: Trustworthy Heterogeonous Computing Abstract: As computing systems become increasingly complex and interconnected, ensuring their security and trustworthiness is becoming a major challenge. Heterogeneous computing, which combines different types of processors and accelerators, is particularly vulnerable to attacks and vulnerabilities. This talk will explore the current state of trustworthy heterogeneous computing and discuss the latest advances in security and privacy for these systems. We will also examine the challenges and opportunities in designing and implementing secure heterogeneous computing architectures, and discuss potential future research directions in this exciting and rapidly evolving field. Bio: Prof. Pramod Bhatotia is a Chair Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the Systems Research Group. More info: https://dse.in.tum.de/bhatotia/
11:30	Speaker: Marten van Dijk Title: Differential Privacy Abstract: A more in-depth explanation of differential privacy will be presented. Differential privacy is an elegant privacy framework which allows us to prove, for a given computation, whether the computation uses a certain data sample as one of its inputs or not. The proof technique for which differential privacy is designed assumes a rather impractically strong adversary. For this reason, if the computation executes stochastic gradient descent for training a machine learning model, too much utility (test accuracy) needs to be sacrificed in order to obtain a useful practical privacy guarantee. What next? Bio: Marten is group leader and founder of the Computer Security group at CWI, the Netherlands, with over 20 years of experience in both industry (Philips Research and RSA Laboratories) and academia (MIT, University of Connecticut, and currently Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam). His work has been recognized by the IEEE CS Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award 2023, the A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation 2015, and has received several best and test-of-time paper awards.
12:15	Closing remarks