Rate My Professor Davide BALZAROTTI

Davide Balzarotti is a Full Professor and Head of the Digital Security Department at EURECOM Graduate School and Research Center in Sophia Antipolis, France, a position he has held since joining the institution in 2009. Specializing in computer science with a focus on digital security, his research interests span system security, including binary and malware analysis, reverse engineering, computer forensics, web security, memory forensics, fuzzing, and advanced malware analysis. Prior to EURECOM, he served as a postdoctoral researcher in computer security at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2006 to 2008. Balzarotti earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2006, with his dissertation titled “Testing Intrusion Detection Systems.” He teaches software development within the Digital Security Department.

Balzarotti's contributions have profoundly influenced the computer security field, evidenced by over 15,000 citations on Google Scholar and more than 100 publications. Notable works include “A Large-scale analysis of the security of embedded firmwares” (USENIX Security 2014), “Cutting the Gordian Knot: A Look Under the Hood of Ransomware Attacks” (DIMVA 2015), “All your contacts are belong to us: automated identity theft attacks on social networks” (WWW 2009), and recent papers such as “Decoding the Secrets of Machine Learning in Malware Classification” (CCS 2023) and “An OS-agnostic Approach to Memory Forensics” (NDSS 2023). He has received the ERC Consolidator Grant for the BITCRUMPS project (2018-2023), Best Paper Awards for “When Malware Changed Its Mind” (CSAW 2021) and “Attacks Landscape in the Dark Side of the Web” (SAC 2017), among others including Best European Student Paper at CCS 2016 and Best Student Paper at ACSAC 2013. Balzarotti served as Program Chair for USENIX Security 2024, chaired RAID 2012 and EUROSEC 2014, and participates in program committees of leading conferences. He maintains the Security Circus, providing annual statistics on publications in top system security conferences.