Frank Piessens
I am a professor in the research group DistriNet (Distributed Systems and Computer Networks) at the Computer Science department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Research Interests
Since 1999, my main research interests are in the field of security. They include among others: secure software engineering (software vulnerabilities, secure programming languages, middleware security), mobile code security and advanced cryptographic protocols.
Current active research tracks include:
- Formal methods for improving software quality and security
- Protecting C and C++ programs from code injection attacks
- Modularizing security concerns by means of aspect oriented software development
In the period 1992-1998, I have worked on foundations of semantic modeling. In particular, I studied categorical approaches to semantic modeling. Using sketches as a specification formalism, I investigated the problem of deciding semantic equivalence of specifications.
Teaching
I am responsible for the following courses:
Key publications:
- Bart Jacobs, Frank Piessens, Jan Smans, K. Rustan M. Leino, Wolfram Schulte, A programming model for concurrent object-oriented programs, ACM transactions on programming languages and systems, volume 31, issue 1, pages 1-48, December 2008
- Lieven Desmet, Petrus Verbaeten, Wouter Joosen, Frank Piessens, Provable protection against web application vulnerabilities related to session data dependencies, IEEE transactions on software engineering, volume 34, issue 1, pages 50-64, January 2008
- Yves Younan, Davide Pozza, Frank Piessens, Wouter Joosen, Extended protection against stack smashing attacks without performance loss, Twenty-Second Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pages 429-438, Miami, Florida, USA, December 11-15, 2006
- Jan Smans, Bart Jacobs, Frank Piessens, Wolfram Schulte, An automatic verifier for Java-like programs based on dynamic frames, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 4961, pages 261-275, Budapest, Hungary, March 29 - April 6 2008
- Adriaan Moors, Frank Piessens, Martin Odersky, Generics of a higher kind, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2008, pages 423-438, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 19-23 October 2008
