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 his 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 phishing attacks, and on studying how these attacks are carried out through documents.

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 starting August 2021. He is researching on automated techniques for detecting vulnerabilities in web applications.

Andrea Mengascini

PhD student

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Andrea is a PhD student starting November 2021.

Gianluca De Stefano

Research internship

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Gianluca is a MSc student from the University of Trento (IT), working on a project at the intersection of machine learning and PDF phishing attacks.

Students

MSc/BSc thesis students

2021/22: Looking for a student project?: Then have a look at this page!

Alumni

Former members/students

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)

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

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)