Vasileios P. Kemerlis

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Vasileios P. Kemerlis is a leading researcher in systems security, with a focus on software hardening, binary analysis, and the emerging security challenges of cyber-physical and robotic systems. His work bridges foundational defenses—such as control-flow integrity and code-pointer separation—with real-world threats, exemplified by his widely noted study that scanned the entire IPv4 address space for instances of the Robot Operating System (ROS). That 2019 paper, which has garnered 9 citations and significant media attention, revealed thousands of exposed robots vulnerable to remote takeover, starkly illustrating how security oversights in robotics research can have physical consequences. Kemerlis’s contributions are characterized by rigorous, practical approaches to protecting software from memory-corruption and code-reuse attacks, and his research has been recognized with multiple best-paper awards and featured in top-tier venues like IEEE S&P and USENIX Security. For students and researchers, his work offers a compelling model of how deep technical insight can anticipate and mitigate the risks of an increasingly automated world.