Research Group

Researchers

FTEs and assistants

Giancarlo Pellegrino

Group leader

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Giancarlo is a tenure-track faculty at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. Before that, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University and research group leader at CISPA as part of the CISPA-Stanford Center for Cybersecurity. Giancarlo got my PhD at Eurecom in Sophia-Antipolis (France), and, until August 2013, Giancarlo was a researcher associate in the Security and Trust group at the SAP research labs.

Giada Stivala

PhD student

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Giada started her PhD in June 2019. Her research interests include automated detection of vulnerabilities in web applications, as well as measurement and study of phishing attacks.

Soheil Khodayari

PhD student

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Soheil is a PhD student since August 2019. His research includes the development of reusable security analysis tools and techniques for the automated detection of vulnerabilities in web applications.

Aleksei Stafeev

PhD student

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Aleksei is a PhD student since August 2021.

Students

MSc/BSc thesis students

2021: Andrea Mengascini: Research internship program, Automated analysis of malcious URLs, University of Bologna (IT)

2021: Jannis Rautenstrauch: MSc thesis project, XS-Leaks in Web Applications, Saarland University (DE)

2020/21: Dominik Kempter: BSc thesis project, Lightweight Dynamic Taint Flow Analysis for State-Changing Operations, Saarland University (DE)

Alumni

Former members/students

2020/21: Dominik Sautter: BSc thesis project, Client-side XSS Detection using Code Property Graphs, Saarland University (DE)

2020/21: Edoardo Vignani: MSc thesis project, Visiting student, Measuring the Challenges when Fuzzing Web Applications, University of Milan (IT)

2020/21: David Ahmed: Research assistant (HiWi).

2020/21: Nicolò Romandini: MSc thesis, Erasmus student, Agents to Explore the Attack Surface of Web Applications, University of Bologna (IT)

2020: Xhelal Likaj: MSc thesis, A Field Study of Anti-CSRF Countermeasures Used in Practice, Saarland University (DE)

2020: Tobias Faber: BSc thesis, Evaluating Strengths and Shortcomings of Web Scanners when Crawling Web Applications, Saarland University (DE)

2019/20: Alexander Troeger: Research assistant (HiWi).

2017: Sebastian Becking: MSc thesis, Old Wine Into New Wineskins: Spreading Malware In Social Networks, Saarland University (DE)

2016-18: Simon Koch: Research assistant (HiWi). MSc thesis, Detecting Race Conditions in Web Applications, Saarland University (DE)

2016-19: Pascal Duprè: Research assistant (HiWi). BSc thesis, Vetting an Advertisement Review System, Saarland University (DE).

2017: Andrey Chernov: MSc thesis, Developing a Property Graph-based Framework for Analysis of Large-scale Network Threats, Saarland University (DE)