Nuno Santos

Nuno Santos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, and a senior researcher at INESC-ID Lisbon, where he leads the SysSec team within the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) group. He is an active member of the international security community, serving as Program Vice Co-Chair for USENIX Security 2025 and on program committees for top venues such as IEEE S&P, CCS, and USENIX Security.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2013 – Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) & Saarland University
• Research internships at Microsoft Research Redmond (2010), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2018), and Technical University of Munich (2024)

Research Interests

Nuno Santos’s research centers on the security and privacy of computer and networked systems, with particular emphasis on trusted execution environments, secure systems design, and the intersection of machine learning with security. His group investigates vulnerabilities and defenses in widely deployed platforms, including TrustZone, JavaScript runtimes, and cloud infrastructures. Additional themes include censorship-resistant communication, privacy-preserving analytics, and automated exploit generation.

Recent Publication Trends

Over the past five years, his work has increasingly targeted emerging threat models in confidential computing (AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX), large-language-model integration into web applications, and automated security analysis of JavaScript ecosystems. These publications consistently appear in the most selective venues (PLDI, SIGMETRICS, ICSE, NDSS, S&P, USENIX Security), evidencing strong empirical evaluation and real-world impact.

Awards & Honors

• IST Outstanding Teaching Award (2019/2020)
• ISOC.PT Best Portuguese Internet Research Award (2024)
• Prémio Científico Universidade de Lisboa / Caixa Geral de Depósitos (2024)
• Multiple IST Teaching Excellence Awards

Advising & Service

Nuno Santos has supervised numerous MSc and PhD students whose theses span secure systems, network privacy, and trustworthy computing. Recent defenses include Bernardo Ribeiro, Cristi Savin, Hugo Mantinhas, João Aragonez, João Sá, and Tomás Tavares. He actively participates in doctoral committees and mentors junior researchers within the DPSS group.

Labs, Teams & Collaborations

He leads the SysSec team inside the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) group at INESC-ID Lisbon. The team maintains strong collaborative ties with MPI-SWS, VUSec at VU Amsterdam, the Systems Research Group at TU Munich, and multiple industry partners including Microsoft Research.