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

2025

Evaluation data for "R+R: IoT Device Identification under Realistic Conditions" (2025)[Dataset Types › Dataset]. Zenodo. Gupta, C., Peter, A. & Continella, A.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17078897WhisperTest: A Voice-Control-based Library for iOS UI Automation (2025)In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025. Moti, Z., Janssen-Groesbeek, T., Monteiro, S., Continella, A. & Acar, G.ConLock: Reducing Runtime Attack Surface in Containerized Microservices (2025)In Proceedings of the International Workshop on System Security Assurance (SecAssure). El Khairi, A., Peter, A. & Continella, A.LibAFLstar: Fast and State-Aware Protocol Fuzzing (2025)In Proceedings of the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS). Daniele, C., Bethe, T., Maugeri, M., Continella, A. & Poll, E.ProCatch: Detecting Execution-based Anomalies in Single-Instance Microservices (2025)In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS). El Khairi, A., Peter, A. & Continella, A.Behavior Nets: Context-Aware Behavior Modeling for Code Injection-Based Windows Malware (2025)ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 28(3), 1-29. Article 33. Starink, J., Huisman, M., Peter, A. & Continella, A.https://doi.org/10.1145/3729228SoK: Hardening Techniques in the Mobile Ecosystem - Are We There Yet? (2025)In Proceedings - IEEE 10th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) 2025 (pp. 789-806). IEEE. Steinbock, M., Troost, J., Van Beijnum, W., Seredynski, J., Bos, H., Lindorfer, M. & Continella, A.https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP63326.2025.00050SoK: Automated TTP Extraction from CTI Reports – Are We There Yet? (2025)In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium: August 13–15, 2025 • Seattle, WA, USA (pp. 4621-4641). USENIX Association. Büchel, M., Paladini, T., Longari, S., Carminati, M., Zanero, S., Binyamini, H., Engelberg, G., Klein, D., Guizzardi, G., Caselli, M., Continella, A., van Steen, M., Peter, A. & van Ede, T.https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/buechelWelcome Message from the EuroSec 25 Chairs (2025)In Proceedings of the 18th European Workshop on Systems Security, EuroSec 2025, Part of EuroSys 2025 (pp. ii). Vasilakis, N. & Continella, A.Toward Automatically Generating User-Specific Recovery Procedures after Windows Malware Infections (2025)In Proceedings - 10th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, Euro S and PW 2025 (pp. 39-47). IEEE. Starink, J., Xu, C. W. & Continella, A.https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW67616.2025.00011

Research profiles

Courses academic year 2025/2026

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 2024/2025

Address

University of Twente

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

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