معرفی
Frank Piessens is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium, with research spanning both offensive and defensive aspects of software and systems security. His defensive work includes formal verification for C-like languages, information flow security enforcement, memory safety hardening, micro-architectural side-channel mitigation, and embedded security architectures. On the attack front, he has pioneered techniques for transient execution vulnerabilities, memory corruption exploits, and controlled channel attacks.
His research interests focus on software security, system security, formal methods, programming languages, and information flow security. Recent publications demonstrate expertise in secure compilation (linear capabilities, control-flow linearization), functional reactive programming for web/IoT systems, and type-theoretic approaches to program equivalence. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical security implementations across hardware-software boundaries.
Professor Piessens maintains active leadership in the academic community through program committee service for top-tier conferences including ACM CCS, Usenix Security, IEEE Security & Privacy, and ACM POPL. He has chaired major events such as POST 2016, IEEE Euro S&P 2018-2019, and IEEE SecDev 2021-2022, while delivering keynotes at SPLASH 2025 and PriSC 2022 on confidential computing and hardware security evidence.
