Frank Piessens
I am a professor in the research group DistriNet (Distributed Systems and Computer Networks) at the Computer Science department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Research Interests
Since 1999, my main research interests are in the field of software security, where I focus on the development of high-assurance techniques to deal with implementation-level software vulnerabilities and bugs, including techniques such as software verification, run-time monitoring, type systems and language based security. These techniques are relevant for many types of software systems, including web applications, embedded software, mobile applications and so forth.
In the period 1992-1998, I have worked on foundations of semantic modeling. In particular, I studied categorical approaches to semantic modeling. Using sketches as a specification formalism, I investigated the problem of deciding semantic equivalence of specifications.
Selected recent PC memberships
- 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2012)
- The Second International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP 2012)
- International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and
Systems (ESSoS 2012)
- 39th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2012)
- 13th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems / 31th IFIP International Conference on FORmal TEchniques for Networked and Distributed Systems (FMOODS/FORTE 2011)
- 20th European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 2011)
- 24th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2010)
- International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems (FMOODS/FORTE 2010)
Teaching
I am responsible for the following courses:
Key publications:
- Bart Jacobs, Frank Piessens, Expressive modular fine-grained concurrency specification, Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (POPL 2011), pages 271-282, Austin, TX, USA, 26-28 January 2011
- Philippe De Ryck, Lieven Desmet, Wouter Joosen, Frank Piessens, Automatic and precise client-side protection against CSRF attacks, European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2011), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 6879, pages 100-116, Leuven, Belgium, 12-14 September 2011
- Dominique Devriese, Frank Piessens, On the bright side of type classes: instance arguments in Agda, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2011), pages 143-155, Tokyo, Japan, 19-21 September 2011
- Dominique Devriese, Frank Piessens, Non-interference through secure multi-execution, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Proceedings, issue 2010, pages 109-124, Oakland, California, US, 16-19 May 2010
- Yves Younan, Pieter Philippaerts, Frank Piessens, Wouter Joosen, Sven Lachmund, Thomas Walter, Filter-resistant code injection on ARM, Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2009), pages 11-20, Chicago, 9-13 November 2009