Home

Georgios Portokalidis

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on February 2010 and then moved to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. I also hold an MSc and BSc in Computer Science from Leiden University and University of Crete, respectively.

My research interests are mainly around the area of software systems and security. Specifically, in the past I have worked on systems software security and hardening, honeypots, taint analysis (information-flow tracking), binary analysis and reverse engineering, run-time and compile-time software instrumentation, control-flow integrity, code-reuse attacks, Tor, and user authentication. For more information check out my CV and my Google Scholar Profile.

If you are a strong C programmer and always curious to learn how things work under the hood, I'm always looking for students to join my group. Prospective PhD students can email me and submit an application to Stevens. Stevens is at an amazing location and it is a great place to do impactful research. Opportunities for MS and undergraduate students are also available. More info under openings.

Contact

georgios Email icon domain name

Twitter icon   GitHub icon

Email icon
Gateway South Building, Room 329
Department of Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology
1 Castle Point Terrace, Hoboken, NJ 07030

Announcements

May '23 Our paper "Eliminating Vulnerabilities by Disabling Unwanted Functionality in Binary Programs" is to appear in ASIACCS 2023.

September '22 Our paper "Towards Understanding the Performance of Rust" is to appear in ASE 2022.

January '22 The web page for CS-576 Systems Security is now up.

December '21 Our paper "Debloating Address Sanitizer" is to appear in USENIX Security 2022.

October '21 Our paper "Building Embedded Systems Like It’s 1996" is to appear in NDSS 2022.

October '21 Our paper "Proving LTL Properties of Bitvector Programs and Decompiled Binaries" is to appear in APLAS 2021.

Aug '21 Our paper "Speculative Probing: Hacking Blind in the Spectre Era" won a Pwnie award for most innovative research.

Aug '21 I was awarded a DARPA Young Faculty Award to work on "Effective Software Monitoring Leveraging Hardware Debugging Extensions."

Research Highlights

Selected Publications

SoK: All You Ever Wanted to Know About x86/x64 Binary Disassembly But Were Afraid to Ask
Chengbin Pang, Ruotong Yu, Yaohui Chen, Eric Koskinen, Georgios Portokalidis, Bing Mao, and Jun Xu
To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, May 2021

Speculative Probing: Hacking Blind in the Spectre Era
Enes Göktaş, Kaveh Razavi, Georgios Portokalidis, Herbert Bos, and Cristiano Giuffrida
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Virtual, November 2020

Nibbler: Debloating Binary Shared Libraries
Ioannis Agadakos, Di Jin, David Williams-King, Vasileios P. Kemerlis, and Georgios Portokalidis
Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), San Juan, Puerto Rico, December 2019 (22.6%)

Position-independent Code Reuse: On the Effectiveness of ASLR in the Absence of Information Disclosure
Enes Göktaş, Benjamin Kollenda, Philipp Koppe, Eric Bosman, Georgios Portokalidis, Thorsten Holz, Herbert Bos, and Cristiano Giuffrida
Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, London, United Kingdom, April 2018 (22.9%)

Techu: Open and Privacy-preserving Crowdsourced GPS for the Masses
Ioannis Agadakos, Jason Polakis, and Georgios Portokalidis
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Niagara Falls, NY, USA, June 2017 (18%)

Location-enhanced Authentication using the IoT
Ioannis Agadakos, Per Hallgren, Dimitrios Damopoulos, Andrei Sabelfeld, and Georgios Portokalidis
Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Los Angeles, CA, USA, December 2016 (22.8%)

Detection and Analysis of Eavesdropping in Anonymous Communication Networks
Sambuddho Chakravarty, Georgios Portokalidis, Michalis Polychronakis, and Angelos D. Keromytis
International Journal of Information Security (IJIS) (Volume 14, Issue 3, Pages 205–220, August 2015)

Selected Grands and Awards

PI, "Effective Software Monitoring Leveraging Hardware Debugging Extensions", DARPA YFA, $492,490, August 2021 - July 2023

PI (lead), "ABIDES: Adaptive BInary Debloating and Security", ONR, $3,243,244, September 2017 - August 2022

PI, "Adapting Static and Dynamic Program Analysis to Effectively Harden Debloated Software" ONR, $467,543, March 2016 - December 2020

PI, "Trails: Efficient Data-Flow Tracking Through HW-assisted Parallelization", DARPA, $462,419, September 2016 - August 2019

PhD Students

Current

Narong Chaiwut (January 2023 - present)

Shan Huang (September 2021 - present)

Ruotong Yu (September 2020 - present)

Vidya Lakshmi Rajagopalan (January 2019 - present)

Konstantinos Kleftogiorgos (September 2018 - present)

Graduated

Yuchen Zhang (September 2019 - May 2023)

Yifan Wang (September 2019 - December 2022)

Ioannis Agadakos (January 2015 - December 2018)

Postdocs/Researchers

Past

Enes Goktas (May 2019 - August 2021)

Dimitrios Damopoulos (2013 - 2015)