Pietro FERRARAView profile
Associate Professor
Pietro Ferrara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on applying abstract interpretation-based static analysis to address security vulnerabilities in software systems, particularly in blockchain smart contracts, IoT devices, and distributed systems. He is a member of the Software and System Verification group and has contributed to frameworks like LiSA for multilanguage static analysis. Teaching responsibilities include courses such as Software Architectures, Object-Oriented Programming, and Introduction to Coding and Data Management across undergraduate and graduate programs. His work emphasizes formal verification techniques, cybersecurity, and privacy enforcement in modern software systems. Recent research explores static analysis for detecting concurrency issues in Hyperledger Fabric, vulnerabilities in Go-based smart contracts, and GDPR-compliant privacy analysis. Ferrara collaborates with industry on practical applications of formal methods, including security policy extraction for ROS2 and industrial blockchain software determinism. His research has been published in top venues such as ACM SAC and IEEE Access, with a strong focus on bridging theoretical program analysis with real-world software systems. He maintains an active presence in open-source tools and educational materials for static analysis techniques.