Elias Athanasopoulos

Elias Athanasopoulos is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Cyprus. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Crete (2011), with prior academic roles including Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2015–2016). His research focuses on system security and privacy, with notable contributions in memory safety, fuzzing frameworks, browser security, and hardware-assisted defenses. He has received prestigious awards including the Best Paper Award at IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (2020) and Outstanding Paper Award at ACM CODASPY (2016).

Education: B.A. in Physics (University of Athens, 2005), MSc and PhD in Computer Science (University of Crete, 2006–2011). Fellowships include Marie Curie (Columbia University, 2011–2013) and FORTH (2014). His work spans over 30 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences like USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, and ACM CCS.

Key research areas include memory safety in Rust binaries, evading NLP systems via Unicode exploits, and mitigating network-based Rowhammer attacks. His projects often bridge software/hardware boundaries, such as GPU-based cryptographic operations (PixelVault) and hardware-enforced control-flow integrity (HCFI).