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dr.ir. A. Continella (Andrea)

Associate Professor

About Me

I am an Associate Professor in the Semantics, Cybersecurity and Services group of the University of Twente and a member of the International Secure Systems Lab (iSecLab).

Before joining the University of Twente, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Barbara, working at the SecLab, and I obtained a Ph.D. cum laude in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in Italy. During my Ph.D., I also took part in two research exchanges, working as a visiting researcher at UCSB and at the School of Computer Science of the University of Sydney.

My research focuses on aspects of computer security traditionally known as systems security. In particular, my main research interests lie in the security of the software that people use in their daily tasks, and revolve around analyzing such software for multiple security purposes, such as malware detection, identification of privacy disclosures, and vulnerability discovery. For example, I have worked on analysis and defense mechanisms against advanced threats such as the infamous ransomware families, on the detection of obfuscated privacy leaks in Android apps, and on the design of novel program analysis techniques to identify and patch vulnerabilities in embedded firmware.

I strongly believe in open, collaborative science, where researchers can easily and quickly access to previous research outcomes to reproduce and analyze results obtained by others.

I also love Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions, which I currently play with Shellphish (usually ending up in Vegas to play DEFCON Finals), and I co-organized several editions of the PoliCTF and iCTF.

Organisations

Publications

Recent
Khairi, A. E., Caselli, M. , Peter, A. , & Continella, A. (2024). ReplicaWatcher: Training-less Anomaly Detection in Containerized Microservices. In Proceedings of the 31th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2024) Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2024.24286
Starink, J. , Huisman, M. , Peter, A. , & Continella, A. (2023). Understanding and Measuring Inter-Process Code Injection in Windows Malware. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2023)
Gustafson, E., Grosen, P., Redini, N., Jha, S., Wang, R. , Continella, A., Fu, K., Rampazzi, S., Kruegel, C., & Vigna, G. (2023). Shimware: Toward Practical Security Retrofitting for Monolithic Firmware Images. In RAID '23: Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, Hong Kong, China, October 16-18, 2023 (pp. 32-45). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3607199.3607217
Pimienta, J., Brandt, J., Bethe, T. , Holz, R. , Continella, A., Jibb, L., & Grundy, Q. (2023). Mobile apps and children's privacy: A traffic analysis of data sharing practices among children's mobile iOS apps. Archives of disease in childhood, 108(11), 943-945. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2023-325960
van Ede, T. S. (2023). Comprehending Security Events: Context-Based Identification and Explanation. [PhD Thesis - Research UT, graduation UT, University of Twente]. University of Twente. https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036558891
Hafkemeyer, L. , Starink, J. , & Continella, A. (2023). Divak: Non-invasive Characterization of Out-Of-Bounds Write Vulnerabilities. In Proceedings of the Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA)
Ibrahim, M. , Continella, A., & Bianchi, A. (2023). AoT - Attack on Things: A security analysis of IoT firmware updates. In Proceedings - 8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Euro S and P 2023 (pp. 1047-1064). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00065
Gupta, C. , Ede, T. V. , & Continella, A. (2023). HoneyKube: Designing and Deploying a Microservices-based Web Honeypot. In Proceeding - 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, SPW 2023 (pp. 1-11). (Proceeding - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW); Vol. 2023). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/SPW59333.2023.00005
Bose, P., Das, D., Vasan, S., Mariani, S., Grishchenko, I. , Continella, A., Bianchi, A., Kruegel, C., & Vigna, G. (2023). COLUMBUS: Android App Testing Through Systematic Callback Exploration. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 1381-1392) https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00121

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Visiting Address

University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Zilverling (building no. 11), room 2023
Hallenweg 19
7522NH  Enschede
The Netherlands

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Mailing Address

University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Zilverling  2023
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands

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University of Twente Drienerlolaan 5
7522 NB Enschede
+31 (0)53 489 9111
info@utwente.nl
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