I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Security and Privacy Research Unit at TU Wien (Technische Universität Wien, formerly known as Vienna University of Technology) in Vienna, Austria. I am also a key researcher at SBA Research, the largest research center in Austria which exclusively addresses information security.
Before that, I was a Postdoc in the Computer Security Group (SecLab) at UC Santa Barbara, working with Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna. I received my doctorate in 2016 with honors of the Austrian president (Promotio Sub Auspiciis Praesidentis), as well as the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award in 2018. During my PhD, I was advised by Edgar Weippl and worked as a research assistant at the International Secure Systems Lab (iSecLab).
In addition to my PhD, I hold a Master's degree in Software Engineering and Internet Computing from TU Wien and a Bachelor's degree in Computer and Media Security from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg.
My research focuses on systems security, in particular mobile security and privacy, and all things malware analysis.
I am passionate about building large-scale analysis systems and providing them to the community. For example, I led the development and maintenance of Andrubis, a publicly available service to analyze Android apps for malicious behavior, and I am a contributor to ReCon, a tool that allows users to take control over which data mobile apps are leaking. I also work on the exploitation of and defense against rowhammer and other side-channel vulnerabilities, such as Drammer, the first deterministic attack that exploits the rowhammer hardware vulnerability on Android devices.
2020 | |
Aug 27 | Jürgen Cito and me are looking for a student employee for a Master thesis at the intersection of software engineering and security. |
Jul 29 | I have 3 open positions for PhD students (2 related to mobile app analysis for IoT + 1 on machine learning for security). Ping me if you are interested! |
Jul 13 | Our Doctoral College for Secure and Intelligent Human-Centric Digital Technologies (SecInt) on the intersection of Security and Privacy, Machine Learning, and Formal Methods has been accepted! |
Jun 10 | Thanks Victoria Kirner for the nice interview (including stylish portraits!) and discussion about rubber boots for C/O Vienna Magazine. |
Apr 2 | I was featured in Die Zeit for their portrait series about Austrians! |
Mar 18 | Honored to receive the Early Career Award for Women in Cybersecurity Research at ACM CyberW. Special thanks to Daphne Yao: as last time at CCS 2017, it was a great workshop that hopefully continues! |
Jan 30 | Had the pleasure to talk to school girls as part of the Tagebuch der Informatikerin (Diary of a Computer Scientist) to clear up common misconceptions and stereotypes about careers in tech. |
Jan 11 | Recent press roundup: I was a guest on the Kleine Zeitung's Startgepräch Podcast, as well as got the chance to talk to Der Standard and Die Presse about my research and my career path. |
2019 | |
Nov 5 | Honored to receive this years Hedy Lamarr Award from the City of Vienna. Looking forward to being part of this network of innovative female researchers in computer science! |
Nov 4 | The Vienna Science, Research and Technology Fund (WWTF) accepted our proposal IoTIO: Analyzing and Understanding the Internet of Insecure Things with funding for 2 PhD positions for 4 years. Official announcement of positions will come in February! |
Oct 1 | Welcome to my first official PhD student Jakob Bleier, who will be working with me on mobile security and privacy topics! |
Aug 10 | We have some last minute funding for diversity grants for our summer school for security and privacy on blockchains (BDLT19) sponsored by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. |
Jul 1 | I am proud to announce that I am now also a key researcher at SBA Research. |
Jun 27 | Elleen is presenting Panoptispy, our work on media leaks in mobile apps, at PrivacyCon hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). |
Jun 17 | We wrapped up the first iteration of our new Introduction to Security lecture with 300 participants with a presentation of the best of the 1,600 solutions to 11 challenges in our WUT CTF. |
Jun 12 | We are organizing the 1st International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies at TU Wien in September, the registration is now open. |
Jan 31 | I am looking for PhD students in (mobile) systems security and privacy! More information here. |
Jan 8 | Thanks Florian Aigner @ TU Wien for the nice profile about me and my research! |
2018 | |
Oct 9 | I am honored to receive the 2018 ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award. |
Aug 6 | Rampage received a Pwnie nomination for Best Privilege Escalation Bug. |
Jun 19 | I am excited to officially announce that I will join TU Wien as an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in October. |
2017 | |
Nov 11 | Drammer received the Best Paper Award at the CSAW'17 Applied Research Competition. |
Oct 2 | I am excited to be selected as a mentor for Learn IT, Girl, a program that helps women around the globe to learn how to code. |
Jul 26 | Drammer received a Pwnie Award for Best Privilege Escalation Bug and was also nominated for Most Innovative Research. |
May 20 | I was interviewed by the Austrian daily newspaper Kurier on why more women should study computer science (print and online). |
May 16 | I am honored to be awarded my doctorate degree in a Promotio Sub Auspiciis Praesidentis (press release by TU Wien). |
Apr 5 | ReCon was used in the documentary Harvest to raise awareness about privacy risks of mobile apps. |
Mar 21 | Drammer received the Best Dutch Cyber Security Research Paper (DCSRP2017) award. |
2016 | |
Nov 1 | Drammer was recognized by the Android Security Rewards Program (CVE-2016-6728, critical). |
Program Committee Member
External Reviewer
Journal Reviewer (excerpt)
Guest Editor
@inproceedings{txting:wtmc20, author = {van der Toorn, Olivier and van Rijswijk-Deij, Roland and Fiebig, Tobias and Lindorfer, Martina and Sperotto, Anna}, title = {{TXTing 101: Finding Security Issues in the Long Tail of DNS TXT Records}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity (WTMC)}, year = {2020} }
@inproceedings{flowprint:ndss20, author = {van Ede, Thijs and Bortolameotti, Riccardo and Continella, Andrea and Ren, Jingjing and Dubois, Daniel J. and Lindorfer, Martina and Choffnes, David and van Steen, Marten and Peter, Andreas}, title = {{FlowPrint: Semi-Supervised Mobile-App Fingerprinting on Encrypted Network Traffic}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)}, year = {2020} }
@inproceedings{packware:ndss20, author = {Hojjat Aghakhani and Fabio Gritti and Francesco Mecca and Martina Lindorfer and Stefano Ortolani and Davide Balzarotti and Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel}, title = {{When Malware is Packin' Heat; Limits of Machine Learning Classifiers Based on Static Analysis Features}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)}, year = {2020} }
@inproceedings{minesweeper:ccs18, author = {Radhesh Krishnan Konoth and Emanuele Vineti and Veelasha Moonsamy and Martina Lindorfer and Christopher Kruegel and Herbert Bos and Giovanni Vigna}, title = {{MineSweeper: An In-depth Look into Drive-by Cryptocurrency Mining and Its Defense}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)}, year = {2018} }
@inproceedings{panoptispy:pets18, author = {Elleen Pan and Jingjing Ren and Martina Lindorfer and Christo Wilson and David Choffnes}, title = {{Panoptispy: Characterizing Audio and Video Exfiltration from Android Applications}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)}, year = {2018} }
@inproceedings{guardion:dimva18, author = {Victor van der Veen and Martina Lindorfer and Yanick Fratantonio and Harikrishnan Padmanabha Pillai and Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel and Herbert Bos and Kaveh Razavi}, title = {{GuardION: Practical Mitigation of DMA-based Rowhammer Attacks on ARM}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware \& Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA)}, year = {2018} }
@inproceedings{appversions:ndss18, author = {Jingjing Ren and Martina Lindorfer and Daniel Dubois and Ashwin Rao and David Choffnes and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez}, title = {{Bug Fixes, Improvements, ... and Privacy Leaks -- A Longitudinal Study of PII Leaks Across Android App Versions}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)}, year = {2018} }
@inproceedings{agrigento:ndss17, author = {Andrea Continella and Yanick Fratantonio and Martina Lindorfer and Alessandro Puccetti and Ali Zand and Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna}, title = {{Obfuscation-Resilient Privacy Leak Detection for Mobile Apps Through Differential Analysis}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)}, year = {2017} }
@inproceedings{drammer:ccs16, author = {Victor {van der Veen} and Yanick Fratantonio and Martina Lindorfer and Daniel Gruss and Cl{\'e}mentine Maurice and Giovanni Vigna and Herbert Bos and Kaveh Razavi and Cristiano Giuffrida}, title = {{Drammer: Deterministic Rowhammer Attacks on Mobile Platforms}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)}, year = {2016} }
@inproceedings{recon:mobisys16, author = {Jingjing Ren and Ashwin Rao and Martina Lindorfer and Arnaud Legout and David Choffnes}, title = {{ReCon: Revealing and Controlling PII Leaks in Mobile Network Traffic}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys)}, year = {2016} }
@inproceedings{curiousdroid:fc16, author = {Carter, Patrick and Mulliner, Collin and Lindorfer, Martina and Robertson, William and Kirda, Engin}, title = {{CuriousDroid: Automated User Interface Interaction for Android Application Analysis Sandboxes}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC)}, year = {2016} }
@inproceedings{marvin:compsac2015, author = {Lindorfer, Martina and Neugschwandtner, Matthias and Platzer, Christian}, title = {{Marvin: Efficient and Comprehensive Mobile App Classification Through Static and Dynamic Analysis}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual International Computers, Software \& Applications Conference (COMPSAC)}, year = {2015} }
@inproceedings{andrubis:badgers14, author = {Martina Lindorfer and Matthias Neugschwandtner and Lukas Weichselbaum and Yanick Fratantonio and Victor {van der Veen} and Christian Platzer}, title = {{Andrubis - 1,000,000 Apps Later: A View on Current Android Malware Behaviors}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the the International Workshop on Building Analysis Datasets and Gathering Experience Returns for Security (BADGERS)}, year = {2014} }
@inproceedings{andradar:dimva14, author = {Lindorfer, Martina and Volanis, Stamatis and Sisto, Alessandro and Neugschwandtner, Matthias and Athanasopoulos, Elias and Maggi, Federico and Platzer, Christian and Zanero, Stefano and Ioannidis, Sotiris}, title = {{AndRadar: Fast Discovery of Android Applications in Alternative Markets}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware \& Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA)}, year = {2014} }
@inproceedings{platzer2014:skinsheriff, author = {Platzer, Christian and Stuetz, Martin and Lindorfer, Martina}, title = {{Skin Sheriff: A Machine Learning Solution for Detecting Explicit Images}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Security and Forensics in Communication Systems (ASIACCS-SFCS)}, year = {2014} }
@inproceedings{sandboxcomparison:most14, author = {Sebastian Neuner and Victor {van der Veen} and Martina Lindorfer and Markus Huber and Georg Merzdovnik and Martin Mulazzani and Edgar Weippl}, title = {{Enter Sandbox: Android Sandbox Comparison}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Mobile Security Technologies Workshop (MoST)}, year = {2014} }
@inproceedings{lindorfer2013:macmal, author = {Lindorfer, Martina and Miller, Bernhard and Neugschwandtner, Matthias and Platzer, Christian}, title = {{Take a Bite - Finding the Worm in the Apple}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing (ICICS)}, year = {2013} }
@inproceedings{webview:neugschwandtner2013, author = {Neugschwandtner, Matthias and Lindorfer, Martina and Platzer, Christian}, title = {{A View To A Kill: WebView Exploitation}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET)}, year = {2013} }
@inproceedings{lindorfer2012:beagle, author = {Lindorfer, Martina and Di Federico, Alessandro and Maggi, Federico and Milani Comparetti, Paolo and Zanero, Stefano}, title = {{Lines of Malicious Code: Insights Into the Malicious Software Industry}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)}, year = {2012} }
@inproceedings{lindorfer2011:disarm, author = {Lindorfer, Martina and Kolbitsch, Clemens and Milani Comparetti, Paolo}, title = {{Detecting Environment-Sensitive Malware}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID)}, year = {2011} }