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Georgios Portokalidis

I am an Associate Research Professor at IMDEA Software Institute. I am also an Visiting Research 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 programmer, security-minded, and love operating systems, I'm looking for students and researchers to join my research group in Madrid. The IMDEA Software Institute is one of the top institutes for computer security research in Europe! More info under openings.

Contact

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IMDEA Software Institute
Campus Montegancedo s/n
28223 Pozuelo de Alarcon, Madrid
SPAIN

Announcements

September '24 Our paper "SIDECAR: Leveraging Debugging Extensions in Commodity Processors to Secure Software" is to appear in ACSAC 2024!

September '24 Our paper "Evaluating the Effect of Improved Indirect Call Resolution on System Call Debloating" is to appear in FEAST 2024 (co-located with CCS).

September '23 I am thrilled to announce that I have taken on the role of Associate Research Professor at IMDEA Software Institute.

September '23 Our paper "SysPart: Automated Temporal System Call Filtering for Binaries" is to appear in CCS 2023.

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.

Research Highlights

Selected Publications

SysPart: Automated Temporal System Call Filtering for Binaries
Vidya Lakshmi Rajagopalan, Konstantinos Kleftogiorgos, Enes Göktaş, Jun Xu, and Georgios Portokalidis
To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Copenhagen, Denmark, November 2023 (19.9%)

Eliminating Vulnerabilities by Disabling Unwanted Functionality in Binary Programs
Mohamad Mansouri, Jun Xu, and Georgios Portokalidis
Proceedings of the ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Melbourne, Australia, July 2023

Building Embedded Systems Like It’s 1996
Ruotong Yu, Francesca Del Nin, Yuchen Zhang, Shan Huang, Pallavi Kaliyar, Sarah Zatko, Mauro Conti, Georgios Portokalidis, and Jun Xu
Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, USA, April 2022 (16.2%)

Towards Understanding the Performance of Rust (Short paper)
Yuchen Zhang, Yunhang Zhang, Georgios Portokalidis, and Jun Xu
Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) – Industry Showcase, Oakland Center, MI, USA, October 2022

Towards Optimal Use of Exception Handling Information for Function Detection
Chengbin Pang, Ruotong Yu, Dongpeng Xu, Eric Koskinen, Georgios Portokalidis, and Jun Xu
Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Virtual, June 2021 (16.3%)

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%)

Speculative Memory Checkpointing
Dirk Vogt, Armando Miraglia, Georgios Portokalidis, Herbert Bos, Andy Tanenbaum, and Cristiano Giuffrida
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference, Vancouver, Canada, December 2015

Adaptive Defenses for Commodity Software through Virtual Application Partitioning
Dimitris Geneiatakis, Georgios Portokalidis, Vasileios P. Kemerlis, and Angelos D. Keromytis
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Raleigh, NC, USA, October 2012 (18.9%)

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

Risto Kivilahti (November 2024 - present)

Vidya Lakshmi Rajagopalan (January 2019 - present)

Konstantinos Kleftogiorgos (September 2018 - present)

Graduated

Ruotong Yu (September 2020 - March 2024)

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)

Interns

Current

Fatih Durmaz (April 2024 - March 2024)