Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel in the SecLab at UC Santa Barbara. My research interests focus on several aspects of systems security. Currently, I am actively involved in projects related to automated vulnerability discovery (in firmware blobs and Android applications), and related to human-assisted cyber reasoning systems.

I earned a Ph.D at EURECOM, where I was advised by Davide Balzarotti. Among other things, we investigated how non-atomic acquisitions impact the consistency of memory dumps, and we developed a framework to discover and to assess the quality of memory forensics heuristics.

I love playing Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and I am a core member of NOPS which, by the way, was once defined “probably a top team” by one of the greatest hackers of our time (if you think this is a mere PR stunt, contact me and you will receive proof that this actually happened - for real!).

When I am away from keyboard, I enjoy hiking, rock climbing, surfing, and playing chess.

Publications

2020	SYMBION: Interleaving Symbolic with Concrete Execution Fabio Gritti, Lorenzo Fontana, Eric Gustafson, Fabio Pagani, Andrea Continella, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) [Paper] [Slides]
2019	Introducing the temporal dimension to memory forensics Fabio Pagani, Oleksii Fedorov, Davide Balzarotti ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) [Paper] [Code]
	Back to the whiteboard: a principled approach for the assessment and design of memory forensic techniques Fabio Pagani, Davide Balzarotti Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security) [Paper] [Slides] [Code]
2018	Beyond precision and recall: understanding uses (and misuses) of similarity hashes in binary analysis Fabio Pagani, Matteo Dell'Amico, Davide Balzarotti Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) [Paper] [Slides] [Artifacts]
2016	Taming transactions: Towards hardware-assisted control flow integrity using transactional memory Marius Muench, Fabio Pagani, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Davide Balzarotti Proceedings of the International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses (RAID) [Paper] [Slides] [Code]
	Measuring the Role of Greylisting and Nolisting in Fighting Spam Fabio Pagani, Matteo De Astis, Mariano Graziano, Andrea Lanzi, Davide Balzarotti Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) [Paper] [Slides]
2012	When hardware meets software: A bulletproof solution to forensic memory acquisition Alessandro Reina, Aristide Fattori, Fabio Pagani, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Danilo Bruschi Proceedings of the 28th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) [Paper] [Slides]

Talks

2019	Memory Smearing: Myth or Reality? Fabio Pagani SANS DFIR Europe Summit [Slides]

Service

PC member at DIMVA 2021

Journal reviewer for Computers & Security (COSE)

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