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 find new memory forensics heuristics and to assess the quality of existing ones.

I love playing Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and I was very active on several wargame websites. I am also a core member of the NOPS team 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.