Associate Professor of Computer Science

Overview

Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. His research interests are in the areas of systems and software security, with a focus on OS kernel protection, automated software hardening, fuzz testing, and hardware-assisted security.

Many of Vasilis' proposed systems and defensive techniques have been adopted by major vendors, like Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, or open source projects, such as the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, and the Tor Browser. His work on kernel exploitation and defense has received recognition from both the industry and academia, featuring articles in ;login: (the technical journal of USENIX), multiple presentations at Black Hat (BHEU 2014, BHASIA 2017, and BHUSA 2017), as well as significant coverage in press and social media; in addition, it won the first prize in the Applied Research competition, at the Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) 2014 conference, nominated for a Pwnie award in 2015, and was the runner-up for the IEEE LangSec "Bug of the Year" award in 2024. Lastly, Vasilis' work on fuzz testing ML/DL frameworks for memory errors has helped the TensorFlow and PyTorch developers identify and fix many 0-day vulnerabilities, and was awarded multiple CVEs. Vasilis has also contributed to the design and implementation of Microsoft's primary solution for automatically triaging crash dumps (RETracer), which is now part of the Windows Error Reporting (WER) Platform.

In the past, Vasilis was a member of the Solaris Core Kernel team at Oracle, where he worked on adding support for full Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) in the Solaris OS. Other professional accolades include the NSF CAREER Award, a Distinguished Paper Award in ACM ASIA CCS 2023, a Distinguished Artifact Award in ACM CCS 2025, and service awards from ACM CCS 2025, ACM CCS 2024, ACM CCS 2023, and DIMVA 2020 ("Top/Distinguished/Outstanding Reviewer"). Vasilis holds a PhD (2015), MPhil (2013), and MS (2010) in Computer Science from Columbia University, a BS (2006) in Computer Science from Athens University of Economics and Business, as well as a MA (2025, ad eundem) from Brown University.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas

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