Computer Science

Prof. Dr. Luca Viganò
Department of Informatics
King's College London
Bush House
30 Aldwych
London WC2B 4BG, UK

T: +44 (0) 20 7848 2078

luca.vigano(at)kcl.ac.uk
luca.vigano(at)gmail.com

skype: lucavigano

I am a Professor at the Department of Informatics of King's College London.
I am the head of the Cybersecurity (CYS) group, which studies design, modelling, analysis, verification and testing of networks and systems in order to tackle cybersecurity and privacy problems that are important to industry, society and everyone living in a technologically dependent world.

I am also Global Envoy for King's College London and Vice Dean (Enterprise & Engagement) of the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences.

• Cryptography (6CCS3CIS & 7CCSMCIS)
  BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2020-21, semester 1.

• Cryptography (6CCS3CIS & 7CCSMCIS)
  BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2019-20, semester 1.
• Network Security (6CCS3NSE & 7CCSMNSE)
  with Nishanth Sastry, BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2015-16, 2016-17, semester 2.
• Cryptography and Information Security (6CCS3CIS & 7CCSMCIS)
  BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 semester 1.
• Advanced Security Topics (6CCS3AST & 7CCSMAST)
  with Nishanth Sastry, BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2014-15, semester 2.
• Cryptography and Information Security (6CCS3CIS & 7CCSMCIS)
  BSc, MSCi and MSc course, King's College London, 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 semester 1.
• Software Engineering of Internet Applications (7CCSMSIA)
  MSc course, King's College London, 2013-14 semester 2.

• Network Security
• Network and Systems Security
• Information Security
• Formal Methods for Information Security
• Software Engineering
• Logic

• Formal methods for security and privacy
• Security protocols, services and applications
• Security Testing
• Software Engineering
• Non-classical logics (modal logics, substructural logics, etc.)
• Proof theory

• UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (TAS)
  Member of the King's College London team.

• Cryptoculture3.0: The creative partnership of Cybersecurity, Psychology and the Arts
• Security Horizons
  Coordinator of the Verona unit; Italian MIUR PRIN 2010-11 project, 2013 - 2016
• GeTFun: Generalizing Truth-Functionality
  Coordinator of the London (formerly Verona) unit; Marie Curie project PIRSES-GA-2012-318986, EU-FP7, 01 January 2013 - 31 December 2016
• SPaCIoS: Secure Provision and Consumption in the Internet of Services
  Coordinator; project no. 257876, FP7-ICT-2009-5, ICT-2009.1.4: Trustworthy ICT, 01 October 2010 - 31 January 2014
• AVANTSSAR: Automated VAlidatioN of Trust and Security of Service-oriented ARchitectures
  Coordinator; project no. 216471, FP7-ICT-2007-1, ICT-1-.4: Secure, dependable and trusted Infrastructures, 01 January 2008 - 31 December 2010
• AVISPA: Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications
  FET Open Project IST-2001-39252, 01 January 2003 - 30 June 2005
• AVISS: Automated Verification of Infinite State Systems
  FET Open Assessment Project IST- 2000-26410, 01 May 2001 - 30 April 2002
• SOFT: Software Oriented Formal Techniques
  Coordinator of the Verona unit; Italian MIUR PRIN'07 project, 22 September 2008 - 21 September 2010

This is a word cloud of my papers' titles (as of early 2015).
For a more or less up to date list of (most of) my publications please refer to

• DBLP
• Google scholar

Please, note that I deliberately omitted referring to Scopus or ISI, as their databases are partial and incomplete.
Also, note that I utterly dislike quantitative measures to evaluate research. So, you will not find on this webpage information about my h-index (normalized or not), i10-index, or the number of citations that my papers have received. Instead, I strongly believe that research should be assessed qualitatively. In other words, I ask you to please make the effort to read my papers to assess their contributions. If you wish, I'd be happy to tell you which n papers (say, for n=5) I believe are most important.
If, after having read the previous paragraph, you are still looking for numbers, let me tell you some numbers that I am proud of:

• Erdös number: 4 (David A. Basin, Matt Kaufmann, Michael Makkai, Paul Erdös).
  It reduces to 3 (Dov M. Gabbay, Sharon Shelah, Paul Erdös; Andre Scedrov, Andreas R. Blass, Paul Erdös) if one counts the fact that I co-edited a book with Dov or a special issue of a journal with Andre.
• Bacon number: 4 (Paolo Kessisoglu, Luca Zingaretti, Aida Turturro, Kevin Bacon).
  This is unofficial, though, as I was an unbilled extra in an episode of the Italian TV series "Camera Café" when I visited my old friend Paolo on the set. It actually reduces to 3 (Flavio Parenti, Jesse Eisenberg, Kevin Bacon) if one counts the fact that Flavio played the lead role in a production of my play "Galois".

... standing on ye sholders of Giants.
(Sir Isaac Newton)

I am also particularly proud of my list of co-authors (to be added soon) and of my academic genealogy.
The following is (mostly) from the The Mathematics Geneaology Project:

Direct lineage
Luca Viganò, Doctorate from University of Saarland in 1997
David Basin, Doctorate from Cornell University in 1989
Bob Constable, Doctorate from University of Wisconsin in 1968
Stephen Kleene, Doctorate from Princeton University in 1934
Alonzo Church, Doctorate from Princeton University in 1927
Oswald Veblen, Doctorate from University of Chicago in 1903
Eliakim Hastings Moore, Doctorate from Yale University in 1885
Hubert Anson Newton, Doctorate from Yale University in 1850
Michel Chasles, Doctorate from Ecole Polytechnique in 1814
Simeon Denis Poisson, Doctorate from Ecole Polytechnique, ?
Joseph Louis Lagrange, no degree... but I guess he didn't need it :-)

Some other relatives
Brothers: Seán Matthews, Ina Kraan, Ian Frank, Abdelwaheb Ayari, Torsten Lodderstedt, Felix Klaedtke, Sebastian Mödersheim, Achim Brucker, Paul Sevinç, Diana von Bidder, Paul Hankes Drielsma, Boris Köpf, Manuel Hilty (see David Basin's webpage for information after 2007)
Uncles: Ed Clarke, Kurt Mehlhorn
Great uncles: Yiannis Moschovakis
Great great uncles: Martin Davis, Michael Rabin, Hartly Rogers, Dana Scott, Raymond Smullyan, Alan Turing

Children
see PhD Students below.

• Current

• Past
• Alberto Calvi
Topic: Model-based and vulnerability-driven security testing.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, June 2015 - May 2016.

• Michele Peroli
Topic: Model-based security testing for web applications.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, June 2015 - May 2016.

• Marco Rocchetto
Topic: Formal analysis of security protocols and web applications.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, June 2015 - May 2016.

• Marco Volpe.
  Topic: Attack patterns, trees and graph for the automated formal testing of applications in the Internet of Services.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, 01 April 2012 - 30 September 2014.
  Topic: Deduction systems for temporal logics and their application to problems in information security.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, 01 May 2010 - 28 February 2011.
• Silvio Ranise.
  Topic: Formal methods for the validation of security services.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, 01 May 2008 - 31 May 2010.

• Current (all at King's College London, UK)
• Amir Kiani
• Andrew Cook
• Rawan Alrahili
• Parvin Sadigova

• Past
• Diego Sempreboni
A formal approach for the analysis of the security of socio-technical systems.
King's College London, UK, 2020.
• Federico De Meo
A Formal and Automated Approach to Exploiting Multi-Stage Attacks of Web Applications.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, June 2018.
• Matteo Zavatteri
Temporal and Resource Controllability of Workflows Under Uncertainty.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, June 2018.
• Alberto Calvi.
  Methods for model-based and vulnerability-driven security testing.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, May 2015.
• Michele Peroli
A model based security testing approach for web applications.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, May 2015.
• Marco Rocchetto
Methods and tools for design time and runtime formal analysis of security protocols and web applications.
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, May 2015.
• Erisa Karafili.
  Deduction and algorithmic approaches to reason about risk, privacy and security in multi-agent systems.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, April 2014.
• Michele Barletta.
  Authorization Policies in Security-Sensitive Web Services and Applications: Formal Modeling and Analysis.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, April 2012.
• Marco Volpe.
  Labeled Natural Deduction for Temporal Logics.
  Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy, May 2010.
• Paul Hankes Drielsma.
  Building Formal Models of Next Generation Security Protocols.
  ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2007. Unofficial joint supervision with Prof. Dr. David Basin.
• Sebastian Mödersheim.
  Models and Methods for the Automated Analysis of Security Protocols.
  ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2007. Unofficial joint supervision with Prof. Dr. David Basin.

• Journals
• Member of the Editorial Board of Acta Informatica.
• Specialty Chief Editor of the Computer and Network Security section of Frontiers in Computer Science.
• Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cybersecurity.
• Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming.
• Former member of the Editorial Board of Information Processing Letters (IPL).

• Conferences: Steering Committee (all former)
• Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF).
• Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (POST).
• Foundations of Computer Security (FCS) Workshop Series.
• First-Order Theorem Proving (FTP) Workshop Series.
• Test and Proofs (TAP) conference.

• Conferences: Organization (selection)
• Financial Chair of the Computer Security Foundations Symposium CSF since 2016.
• Computer Security Foundations Symposium CSF 2015.
• Computer Security Foundations Symposium CSF 2014.
• Organizer of several other conferences in security and logics.

• Conferences: PC Chair (selection)
• POST 2016 (5th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust), ETAPS 2016, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2-8 April 2016. Co-chair with Frank Piessens.
• HotSpot 2015 (3rd Workshop on Hot Issues in Security Principles and Trust), affiliated with ETAPS 2015, London, UK, 18 April 2015.
• PC Chair of several other conferences in security and logics.

• Conferences: PC Member (selection)
• C&TC 2015: Cloud and Trusted Computing 2015, International Symposium on Secure Virtual Infrastructures, Rhodes, Greece, 26-28 October 2015.
• ESORICS 2015, 20th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Vienna, Austria, 23-25 September 2015.
• FroCoS 2015, 10th International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems, co-located with Tableaux 2015, Wroclaw, Poland, 19-24 September 2015.
• Tableaux 2015, 24th conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, co-located with FroCoS 2015, Wroclaw, Poland, 19-24 September 2015.
• TAP 2015, the 9th International Conference on Tests and Proofs, L'Aquila, Italy, 20-24 July 2015.
• SECRYPT 2015, 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography, Colmar, France, 20-22 July 2015.
• FCS 2015, Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security, Verona, Italy, 13 July 2015.
• GraMSec 2015, the Second International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security, Verona, Italy, 13 July 2015.
• STAST 2015, the 5th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust, Verona, Italy, 13 July 2015.
• SECTEST 2015, the 6th international Workshop on Security Testing, co-located with the 8th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2015) Graz, Austria, 13 April 2015.
• Member of the PC of several other conferences in security and logics.

• Working Groups
• Member of the IFIP WG 1.7 "Theoretical Foundations of Security Analysis and Design".

• Appointments
• Full professor
  Department of Informatics, King's College London, UK.
  Since October 2013.
• Associate professor
  Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy.
  October 2006 - September 2013.
• Oberassistent (Senior assistant)
  Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
  January 2003 - September 2006.
• Wissenschaftlicher Assistent C1 (Research scientist)
  Institute for Computer Science, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.
  October 1997 - December 2002.
• PhD student / Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
  Max-Planck-Institut for Computer Science, Saarbrücken, Germany.
  March 1994 - September 1997.
• Education
• Habilitation in Informatik (Habilitation in Computer Science)
  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, 2003.
• Promotion in Informatik (Dr.-Ing.; PhD in computer science)
  Universität des Saarlandes, Germany, September 1997.
• Esame di Stato per l'abilitazione alla professione di Ingegnere (State professional qualifying examination in engineering).
  Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy, January 1995.
• Laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica (MSc in Electronic Engineering)
  Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy, January 1994.