dr.ir. A. Continella | People Pages: Find employees & contact details

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

2024

Inferring Recovery Steps from Cyber Threat Intelligence Reports. Kucsván, Z. L., Caselli, M., Peter, A. & Continella, A.ReplicaWatcher: Training-less Anomaly Detection in Containerized MicroservicesIn Proceedings of the 31th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2024). Association for Computing Machinery. Khairi, A. E., Caselli, M., Peter, A. & Continella, A.https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2024.24286ERAFL: Efficient Resource Allocation for Federated Learning Training in Smart Homes (Accepted/In press). Rezaei, T., Bayhan, S., Continella, A. & van Rijswijk - Deij, R. M.

2023

Comprehending Security Events: Context-Based Identification and Explanation. University of Twente. van Ede, T. S.https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036558891Mobile apps and children's privacy: A traffic analysis of data sharing practices among children's mobile iOS apps, 943-945. Pimienta, J., Brandt, J., Bethe, T., Holz, R., Continella, A., Jibb, L. & Grundy, Q.https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2023-325960Shimware: Toward Practical Security Retrofitting for Monolithic Firmware ImagesIn 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. Gustafson, E., Grosen, P., Redini, N., Jha, S., Wang, R., Continella, A., Fu, K., Rampazzi, S., Kruegel, C. & Vigna, G.https://doi.org/10.1145/3607199.3607217Understanding and Measuring Inter-Process Code Injection in Windows MalwareIn Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2023). Starink, J., Huisman, M., Peter, A. & Continella, A.COLUMBUS: Android App Testing Through Systematic Callback ExplorationIn Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 1381-1392). Bose, P., Das, D., Vasan, S., Mariani, S., Grishchenko, I., Continella, A., Bianchi, A., Kruegel, C. & Vigna, G.https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00121Divak: Non-invasive Characterization of Out-Of-Bounds Write VulnerabilitiesIn Proceedings of the Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA). Hafkemeyer, L., Starink, J. & Continella, A.AoT - Attack on Things: A security analysis of IoT firmware updatesIn Proceedings - 8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Euro S and P 2023 (pp. 1047-1064). IEEE. Ibrahim, M., Continella, A. & Bianchi, A.https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00065

Research profiles

Courses academic year 2023/2024

Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.

Courses academic year 2022/2023

Address

University of Twente

Zilverling (building no. 11), room 2023
Hallenweg 19
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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