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Computer systems

Our vision is that fundamental and experimental research should be done hand in hand, together with realistic applications from a variety of domains.

Our vision is that fundamental and experimental research should be done hand in hand, together with realistic applications from a variety of domains. Our objectives are not only to publish papers in top journals and conferences, but also to produce and distribute software prototypes and to build the necessary experimental infrastructure for our research. We also aim to provide the necessary FAIR data for the field.

Computer Systems are further divided into four research groups: 

Former High Performance Distributed Computing research group
(head: Prof. Dr. Henri Bal)
Systems and Network Security
(head: Prof. Dr. Herbert Bos)
Massivizing Computer Systems
(head: Prof. Dr. Alexandru Iosup)
Foundational and Experimental Security
(head: Prof. Dr. Fabio Massacci)

To go to group's website, click here.

Security at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Security at Vrije Universiteit brings together experts from a variety of disciplines to study key practical aspects of cyber security thus making VU one of the largest centers of expertise in this domain. All groups supervise their own Ph.D. and Master students. Check their web page for more information.

Balakrishnan (Bala) Chandrasekaran (PhD 2016) his research focuses on the performance and security aspects of networked systems. Find more information about him.

Cristiano Giuffrida (PhD 2014) his research interests include systems security, reliability, and availability. He was awarded the Roger Needham Award and the Dennis M. Ritchie Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer systems in 2015. Find more information about him.

Erik Van der Kouwe (PhD 2016) his research interests include practical compiler-assisted defenses against zero-day vulnerabilities and the proper benchmarking of such defenses. Find more information about him.

Fabio Massacci (PhD 1998) his research focuses on risks, security economics, security analysis of software ecosystems and experimental methods for security. He received the Ten Years Most Influential Paper award by the IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference in 2015. Find more information about him.

Herbert Bos (PhD 1999) his research interests include systems security, operating system design, networking, and dependable systems. Find more information about him.

Johannes Haertel (PhD in 2023) his special interests include software language engineering, empirical software engineering, software security, statistical modelling, functional programming, machine learning, neural networks, LLMs, natural language processing, big-data processing, mining software repositories, testing, and model-driven software engineering techniques. Click here to read more.

Klaus von Gleissenthall (PhD 2016) his research focuses on reasoning about concurrent and distributed systems and verification of security related properties. Find more information about him.

Kristina Sojakova  (PhD in 2016)

Mengyuan (Maggie) Zhang (PhD 2018) her research interests include security metrics, software security, attack surface, cloud computing/5G security and privacy,  and applied machine learning in security. Find more information about her.

Min Chen (PhD 2024) is passionate to make AI systems more reliable. Her publications can be roughly divided into: Machine Unlearning; Data Ownership Auditing; Attacks and Defenses. Click here for more.

Sabine Oechsner (PhD in 2019) Her research interests are cryptography and provable security, as well as their intersection with formal methods and programming languages. I am particularly interested in making the worlds meet in a way that furthers our understanding of provable security: Instead of merely reproducing existing cryptographic proofs with tool support, my goal is to use formal verification as an opportunity to understand how to write better proofs with high assurance, both on paper and in a machine-checkable way. Click here for more.

Security Education

We offer a new Master’s programme focussed on computer security. For more information go to www.vu.nl/csec

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