Students & Lab
Nataliia Bielova and I are creating a new team at the Inria Centre at Universite Cote d’Azur.
I am currently looking for a PhD student (start date: anytime in 2027) and a Postdoctoral researcher (start date: anytime in 2027 or 2028). More information about the PhD position and application form are available on the Inria portal (no application over email). Please read the guidelines provided here before contacting me about any open positions (PhD, postdoc, or internship). I consistently ignore and do not respond to unspecific emails and emails that appear to have been generated primarily using an LLM.
Student Advising and Mentoring (current and past)
I left CISPA (Germany) at the end of November 2025 and joined Inria in December 2025. My PhD students and research assistant are still physically located at CISPA and Saarland University:
Ph.D. Students
Apr 2024–: Valentino Dalla Valle – Browser Extension Security (paper at ACM TWEB 2026 + papers under submission), Saarland University & CISPA
Dec 2023–: Dominic Troppmann – Type Checks (paper at IEEE/ACM ASE 2024 + under submission), co-supervised with Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Saarland University & CISPA
Research Assistants (HiWis)
Dec 2024–: Laith Alhelwane (MSc student) – Browser Extension Security, Saarland University
Alumni
2025–2026
- Huda Dawoud (she was a PhD student in my group at CISPA until I left in November 2025, now she is working with Sven Bugiel) – Browser Extension Analysis, Saarland University & CISPA
2024–2025
- Abdullah Hassan Chaudhry (MSc student) – Browser Extension Security (paper at MADWeb 2026), Saarland University
2023–2024
- Ben Rosenzweig (BSc thesis) – Machine Learning-Based Approach for Detecting Malicious Browser Extensions (paper at ACM TWEB 2026), Saarland University
2022–2023
- Sheryl Hsu (BSc student) – Browser Extension Security (paper at AsiaCCS 2024), Stanford University
- Manda Tran (MSc student, now Ph.D. student at UCLA) – Browser Extension Security (paper at AsiaCCS 2024), Stanford University
- Liz Izhikevich (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric, now Assistant Professor at UCLA) – Internet Scanning, (paper at ACM IMC 2023), Stanford University
2021–2023
Shubham Agarwal (Ph.D. student of Ben Stock) – Browser Extension Security (paper at ACM CCS 2024), Saarland University & CISPA
Kimberly Ruth (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric) – Web Browsing Behavior, (paper at ACM IMC 2022 + ACM CHI 2025), Stanford University
2022
- Mark Tran (BSc student) – Browser Extension Fingerprinting, Stanford University
- Vrushank Gunjur (BSc student) – Over-Privileged Extensions, Stanford University
- Nahum Maru (BSc student) – Browser Extension Crawler, Stanford University
- Fengchen (Maggie) Gong (MSc student, now Ph.D. student at Princeton) – Browser Fingerprinting, Stanford University
2021
- Liana Patel (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric) – Web Crawler, Stanford University
- Luca Pistor & Nathan Bhak (BSc students) – Exam Software Security, Stanford University
- Paul Szymanski (BSc thesis) – A Study of State-of-the-Art Call Graph Creation Approaches for JavaScript, with Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Saarland University & CISPA
2020
- Anne Christin Deutschen & Luc Seyler (BSc students) – Browser Extension Vulnerability, with Doliere Francis Some, Saarland University & CISPA
2019–2020
- Marvin Moog & Markus Demmel (BSc students) – Analysis of JavaScript Obfuscation Techniques (paper at DSN 2021), Saarland University & CISPA
2019
- Maximilian Zoellner & Niklas Kempf (BSc students) – Intelligent Fuzzing System for JavaScript, Saarland University & CISPA
2018
- Nils Gloerfeld (BSc student) – Malicious JavaScript Deobfuscation, Saarland University & CISPA
- Dennis Salzmann (BSc student) – Malicious JavaScript Detection, Saarland University & CISPA