🎉 @acm_ccs 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan was a blast!

I had a great time connecting with colleagues and friends at ACM SIGSAC's flagship security conference — a week filled with inspiring research and thoughtful discussions.

I was also deeply honored to receive two awards this year (https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2025/awards/):

🏅 Distinguished Artifact Award for our paper "PickleBall: Secure Deserialization of Pickle-based Machine Learning Models" (https://infosec.exchange/@vkemerlis/115409982332037503).

🏆 Top Reviewers Award, recognizing service and contributions to the CCS community. I'm especially grateful for this honor, as it marks the third consecutive year (2023, 2024, and 2025) that I've received a service award from CCS — a tradition I'm proud to continue.

Contributing to the community—through both research and reviewing—has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my academic career. Many thanks to the organizers, colleagues, and students who make CCS such a vibrant and rigorous forum for computer security research!

#acm_ccs #browncs #brownssl 🚀

📢 Last week, Andreas Kellas presented our work on secure deserialization of pickle-based Machine Learning (ML) models at @acm_ccs 2025!

#PickleBall is a static analysis framework that automatically derives and enforces safe deserialization policies for pickle-based machine learning models. It infers permissible object types and load-time behaviors directly from ML-library code and enforces them through a secure, drop-in replacement for Python's pickle module.

This work continues our broader effort to secure deserialization across ecosystems -- building on our earlier research presented by Yaniv David at @ndsssymposium 2024 (https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/quack.ndss24.pdf), and Neophytos Christou and Andreas Kellas at BlackHat USA 2025 (https://www.blackhat.com/us-25/briefings/schedule/index.html#quack-hindering-deserialization-attacks-via-static-duck-typing-44934), which focused on hardening PHP code against deserialization attacks using a static, duck-typing-based approach.

Joint work with Neophytos Christou (Brown University), Columbia University (Junfeng Yang, Penghui Li), Purdue University (James (Jamie) Davis, Wenxin Jiang), Technion (Yaniv David), and Google (Laurent Simon).

✳️ Paper: https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/pickleball.ccs25.pdf
💾 Code: https://github.com/columbia/pickleball

#pickleball #mlsec #mlsecops #acm_ccs #brownssl #browncs

📢 Last week, Brown Secure Systems Lab (SSL, https://gitlab.com/brown-ssl/) was at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2025, where we presented our latest work on hardening OS kernels against attacks that (ab)use heap-based memory-safety vulnerabilities. #IUBIK leverages memory tagging (MTE) and pointer authentication (PA), available in #ARM CPUs, to efficiently and effectively isolate attacker-controlled input from security-critical data in the kernel heap.

👏 Kudos to Marius Momeu (leading author) who did a terrific job presenting our paper -- joint work with Alexander Gaidis (Brown University) and Jasper von der Heidt (Technical University of Munich).

✳️ Paper: https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/iubik.sp25.pdf

💾 Code: https://github.com/tum-itsec/iubik (coming soon)

#iubik #mte #pac #acm #brownssl #browncs #ieeesp2025

See the return of Brown Sciences Library Tetris

“Tetris, Snake, Pong, and other retro classics on the ScilLi.

Partial Showcase (Floors 5-11)
• Wednesday 5/14 @ 10:00pm EDT
• Thursday 5/15 @ 10:00pm EDT

Full Showcase (Floors 3-13)
° Convocation Week - Time TBD

This is probably the last time this event will run, so make sure to see it before it's gone!!”

Instagram: scilibtetris

#tetris #browncs #ProvidenceRI

As we welcome 2025, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on what an extraordinary year 2024 has been for Brown CS Secure Systems Lab (https://gitlab.com/brown-ssl/). It has been a year of innovation, creativity, and growth—both for the lab and for me personally as its director. Witnessing the passion, dedication, and brilliance of our team—Neophytos Christou, Alexander Gaidis, Marius Momeu, @dijin, and Vaggelis Atlidakis—has been truly fulfilling and inspiring!

In 2024, we tackled complex challenges and made significant strides in advancing our research on software hardening and OS kernel protection. Here are some highlights from this remarkable year:

✳️ Marius Momeu presented #SafeSlab at @acm_ccs #CCS2024. Safeslab hardens the Linux SLUB allocator against exploits that abuse use-after-free (#UaF) vulnerabilities, using #Intel #MPK. (Joint work with Technical University of Munich and @mikepo.)
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/safeslab.ccs24.pdf
💾 https://github.com/tum-itsec/safeslab

✳️ Neophytos Christou presented #Eclipse at @acm_ccs #CCS2024. Eclipse is a compiler-assisted framework that propagates artificial data dependencies onto sensitive data, preventing the CPU from using attacker-controlled input during speculative execution.
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/eclipse.ccs24.pdf
💾 https://gitlab.com/brown-ssl/eclipse

✳️ Di Jin presented #BeeBox at the @usenixassociation Security Symposium 2024. BeeBox hardens #Linux BPF/eBPF against transient execution attacks. #usesec24
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/beebox.sec24.pdf
💾 https://gitlab.com/brown-ssl/beebox

✳️ Yaniv David presented #Quack at the NDSS Symposium 2024. Quack hardens PHP code against deserialization attacks using a novel (static) duck typing-based approach. (Joint work with Andreas D Kellas and Junfeng Yang.) #NDSSsymposium2024
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/quack.ndss24.pdf
💾 https://github.com/columbia/quack

✳️ Marius Momeu presented #ISLAB at @ACM #ASIACCS24. ISLAB hardens SLAB-based (kernel) allocators, against memory errors, via SMAP-assisted isolation. (Joint work with Technical University of Munich and @mikepo.) #asiaccs
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/islab.asiaccs24.pdf
💾 https://github.com/tum-itsec/islab

🏆 #EPF (presented by Di Jin at @usenixassociation #ATC 2023) was the runner-up for the "Bug of the Year" award ("Weirdest Machine" category) at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy LangSec (Language-Theoretic Security) workshop 2024! #atc23 #LangSec
⌨️ https://langsec.org/spw24/bugs-of-the-year-awards.html
📄 https://cs.brown.edu/~vpk/papers/epf.atc23.pdf
💾 https://gitlab.com/brown-ssl/epf

🏅 I am honored and delighted to have received the "Distinguished Reviewer Award" at @acm_ccs #CCS2024!

🏅Alexander Gaidis has been awarded the "Distinguished Artifact Reviewer" award at the @usenixassociation Security Symposium 2024!
https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/09/20/brown-cs-phd-student-alexander-j-gaidis-has-been-named-a-usenix-security-2024-distinguished-artifact-reviewer/
#usesec24 #proudadvisor

📢 I had the great pleasure of discussing some of these works recently at the Computer Systems Seminar at Boston University!
📽️ https://www.bu.edu/rhcollab/events/bu-systems-bu%E2%99%BAs-seminar/

#brownssl #browncs 🚀