About
Jo Van Bulck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven's Faculty of Engineering Science, where he leads research in the Distributed and Secure Software (DistriNet) lab. His work focuses on security at the hardware-software boundary, particularly examining trusted execution environments and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities.
Dr. Van Bulck completed his Master's thesis on 'Secure Resource Sharing for Embedded Protected Module Architectures' at KU Leuven in 2015, receiving both the VASCO and BELCLIV thesis awards. He earned his PhD in 2020 with the dissertation 'Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks for Privileged Software Adversaries,' which received multiple prestigious awards including the ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award, ERCIM STM PhD Award, and FWO/IBM Innovation Award.
His research primarily investigates vulnerabilities in trusted execution environments like Intel SGX, with seminal work on attacks such as Foreshadow, LVI, and ZombieLoad. His publications consistently appear in top security venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, and ACM CCS. His research group has made significant contributions to understanding memory isolation failures, interrupt handling vulnerabilities, and developing principled approaches to validate enclave security properties.
Dr. Van Bulck's work has profoundly impacted both academia and industry, with multiple CVE assignments for discovered vulnerabilities and direct influence on hardware and software security practices. His recent research focuses on extending security principles to low-end microcontrollers and developing automated validation frameworks for trusted execution environments.
- ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award (2021)
- FWO/IBM Innovation Award (2021)
- ERCIM WG STM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2021)
- Best Paper with Artifacts Award (SysTEX 2025)
- Distinguished Paper Award (EuroS&P 2025)
- Cybersecurity Artifacts Competition and Impact Award (ACSAC 2023)
Dr. Van Bulck advises multiple PhD students including Márton Bognár (completed 2025) and Fritz Alder (completed 2023), and regularly supervises numerous master's theses. He leads several major research projects including 'Cross-Layer Systems Security for Trusted Execution Environments' (2025-2029) and 'Trustworthy Execution Environments for Secure Computing' (2024-2029). His research has been supported by competitive funding from KU Leuven and collaborative industry partnerships.
As a member of the Council of the Faculty of Engineering Science, Dr. Van Bulck actively contributes to academic governance. He maintains the DistriNet research group's focus on practical security research with real-world impact, evidenced by numerous open-source contributions including the influential SGX-Step framework. His work bridges theoretical security principles with practical implementation challenges in modern computing systems.
