Inaugural Lecture – Prof. Mathias Payer
Event details
| Date | 05.04.2023 |
| Hour | 17:15 › 18:10 |
| Speaker | Prof. Mathias Payer |
| Location | |
| Category | Inaugural lectures - Honorary Lecture |
| Event Language | English |
Date: Wednesday 5 April 2023
Program:
Registration: Click here
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Prof. Mathias Payer
Tales of Program Crashes and Vulnerabilities
Abstract
Software will always have bugs. Some of these bugs are exploitable, giving adversaries unintended access to private data and computation.
We improve security along three dimensions. First, quickly discovering vulnerabilities helps developers fix bugs before code is deployed. Here, we embrace incompleteness to scale to the massive size of current software. Second, mitigating exploitation attempts of unknown bugs, increasing the cost for adversaries. Third, compartmentalizing large monolithic systems into fault domains, limiting adversaries.
This talk gives an overview of the software security landscape in general, and our three research dimensions in particular. We highlight why these focus areas are important and how we increase security guarantees of software systems by fixing bugs early, prohibiting adversaries form exploiting remaining bugs, and isolating faults.
About the speaker
Mathias Payer is a security researcher and professor at EPFL, leading the HexHive group. His research protects applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software/system security with a focus (i) on automated testing to find bugs, (ii) mitigation of exploitation attempts through unknown bugs, and (iii) compartmentalization to limit the impact of remaining issues. As a systems person, his research impacts compilers, operating systems, and architectures. Since moving to EPFL, he was awarded both the prestigious ERC Starting Grant and the SNSF Eccellenza award to foster research in software security.
Program:
- 17:15-17:25: Introduction by Prof. Rüdiger Urbanke, Dean of the IC School
- 17:25-17:55 Inaugural Lecture Prof. Mathias Payer
- 17:55-18:10: Q & A
- 18:10-20:00: Apéritif in the hall outside CO2
Registration: Click here
***********************************************************
Prof. Mathias Payer
Tales of Program Crashes and Vulnerabilities
Abstract
Software will always have bugs. Some of these bugs are exploitable, giving adversaries unintended access to private data and computation.
We improve security along three dimensions. First, quickly discovering vulnerabilities helps developers fix bugs before code is deployed. Here, we embrace incompleteness to scale to the massive size of current software. Second, mitigating exploitation attempts of unknown bugs, increasing the cost for adversaries. Third, compartmentalizing large monolithic systems into fault domains, limiting adversaries.
This talk gives an overview of the software security landscape in general, and our three research dimensions in particular. We highlight why these focus areas are important and how we increase security guarantees of software systems by fixing bugs early, prohibiting adversaries form exploiting remaining bugs, and isolating faults.
About the speaker
Mathias Payer is a security researcher and professor at EPFL, leading the HexHive group. His research protects applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software/system security with a focus (i) on automated testing to find bugs, (ii) mitigation of exploitation attempts through unknown bugs, and (iii) compartmentalization to limit the impact of remaining issues. As a systems person, his research impacts compilers, operating systems, and architectures. Since moving to EPFL, he was awarded both the prestigious ERC Starting Grant and the SNSF Eccellenza award to foster research in software security.
Practical information
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