Michaël Marcozzi

Michaël Marcozzi is a tenured researcher at CEA List institute within Université Paris-Saclay and serves as a visiting lecturer at Institut Polytechnique de Paris. His primary affiliation is with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CEA) at the List Institute, which operates within the Université Paris-Saclay research ecosystem.

Dr. Marcozzi completed his PhD through FNRS/Académie Louvain in Belgium, followed by postdoctoral research at CEA/Inria in France and Imperial College London in the UK.

His research focuses on software security, with particular expertise in fuzzing techniques and program analysis to automatically detect software vulnerabilities. Marcozzi's work bridges the gap between theoretical program analysis and practical security applications, developing methods to guide automated testing tools toward finding vulnerabilities while also advancing the understanding of complex vulnerability types. His research group at CEA List investigates how fine-grained code coverage metrics can improve fuzzing effectiveness and explores novel approaches to vulnerability detection.

Across his publications, Marcozzi demonstrates a consistent focus on improving automated software testing methodologies, particularly through the application of fuzzing to security problems. His work shows an evolution from fundamental coverage-based fuzzing techniques toward more specialized applications like backdoor detection, reflecting the growing sophistication of security threats and testing requirements.

Marcozzi has received several prestigious awards and grants for his research:

• Best artifact award at ICSE'25 for "ROSA: Finding Backdoors with Fuzzing"
• Young Researcher Grant in 2022 from the French National Agency for Research
• ANR PTCC SECUBIC grant (1.5M€) from the French National Agency for Research
• ANR JCJC BACKED grant (2k€) from the French National Agency for Research

As an academic advisor, Marcozzi supervises multiple PhD students and interns including Andy Zalcman, Alexandre Doyen, and Dimitri Kokkonis who are pursuing doctoral research, along with interns Emilien Decoux from Université de Franche-Comté and Kevin Ziadeh from Ecole Polytechnique. His research is supported by significant grant funding totaling over 1.5 million euros from the French National Agency for Research, demonstrating the importance and impact of his work in the cybersecurity community.

Marcozzi leads a research group at CEA List focused on software security, where his team develops and studies code analyses to automatically detect software vulnerabilities. The group's work combines theoretical program analysis with practical security applications, creating tools that "viciously torture" software to reveal its flaws as Marcozzi describes on his social media. His laboratory serves as a hub for cybersecurity research within the Université Paris-Saclay ecosystem, collaborating with both academic and industry partners.