Prof. Mathias Payer

Research Area: Software Security

Prof. Mathias Payer is a security researcher and professor at the EPFL school of computer and communication sciences (IC), leading the HexHive group. His research focuses on protecting applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software security, system security, binary exploitation, effective mitigations, fault isolation/privilege separation, strong sanitization, and software testing (fuzzing) using a combination of binary analysis and compiler-based techniques.
Mathias Payer earned his Doctor of Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2012 and later joined Dawn Song’s BitBlaze group at UC Berkeley for a PostDoc. In 2014 he started the HexHive research group as an assistant professor at Purdue University. After moving to EPFL in 2018, he received both the prestigious ERC Starting Grant (for the CodeSan project) and the SNSF Eccellenza (for the MultiSan project).