Mathias Payer

Mathias Payer is an associate professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Department of Computer Science (CS). His research focuses on protecting applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software security, system security, binary exploitation, effective mitigations, fault isolation/privilege separation, strong sanitization, and software testing (fuzzing) using a combination of binary analysis and compiler-based techniques. He leads the HexHive group and teaches courses on information security and privacy, and software security.

Mathias Payer is a researcher in system and software security, focusing on mitigations, automated testing, and compartmentalization. His work explores vulnerabilities in memory and control-flow integrity, including the effectiveness of control-flow integrity mechanisms and the challenges of memory safety. He has investigated attacks such as Heartbleed and developed tools like T-Fuzz and Magma for fuzzing and benchmarking. His research also addresses privacy-preserving proximity tracing and speculative execution vulnerabilities. Payer's contributions span both theoretical and practical aspects of security, emphasizing the importance of robust software design and automated testing in mitigating security risks.