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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
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
Reidsma, D. , van der Ham, J. , & Continella, A. (2023). Operationalizing Cybersecurity Research Ethics Review: From Principles and Guidelines to Practice. In Proceedings EthiCS 2023: The 2nd International Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security, February 27, 2022, San Diego, CA, USA Internet Society. https://doi.org/10.14722/ethics.2023.237352
Zangrandi, L. M. , Ede, T. V., Booij, T., Sciancalepore, S., Allodi, L. , & Continella, A. (2022). Stepping out of the MUD: Contextual threat information for IoT devices with manufacturer-provided behaviour profiles. In Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2022 Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA). https://doi.org/10.1145/3564625.3564644
Meijer, M., Petrucci, G. T., Schotsman, M., Morgese, L. , Ede, T. V. , Continella, A., Gankhuyag, G., Allodi, L., & Sciancalepore, S. (2022). Federated Lab (FedLab): An Open-source Distributed Platform for Internet of Things (IoT) Research and Experimentation. In IEEE World Forum on IoT (WF-IoT)
Ede, T. V., Khasuntsev, N. , Steen, B. , & Continella, A. (2022). Detecting Anomalous Misconfigurations in AWS Identity and Access Management Policies. In CCSW 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Cloud Computing Security Workshop, co-located with CCS 2022 (pp. 63-74) https://doi.org/10.1145/3560810.3564264
Khairi, A. E., Caselli, M., Knierim, C. , Peter, A. , & Continella, A. (2022). Contextualizing System Calls in Containers for Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection. In CCSW 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Cloud Computing Security Workshop, co-located with CCS 2022 (pp. 9-21). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3560810.3564266

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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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