Rate My Professor Fabio Pierazzi

Fabio Pierazzi is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cybersecurity in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, within the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences. He has served as Deputy Head of the Cybersecurity group since September 2022 and as Programme Leader of the MSc in Cyber Security since Fall 2020, leading efforts to achieve NCSC certification for the program in 2021. Pierazzi holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (2014–2017), with a thesis titled 'Security analytics for prevention and detection of advanced cyberattacks' supervised by Prof. Michele Colajanni. He also earned an MSc and BSc in Computer Engineering and Science from the same university, both with highest honors (110/110 cum laude).

Prior to his current role, which began in September 2019, Pierazzi held postdoctoral positions at the Systems Security Research Lab (joint RHUL and KCL, 2017–2019), University of Modena (2017), and was a visiting research scholar at the University of Maryland College Park (2016). He supervises PhD students on topics including federated learning security, explainability and adversarial robustness, problem-space adversarial robustness, and concept drift anticipation. His research focuses on machine learning for systems security, with emphasis on malware analysis, network intrusion detection, adversarial machine learning, and countermeasures against adaptive attackers in non-stationary contexts. Pierazzi has authored papers in top venues such as USENIX Security and IEEE S&P, including 'Dos and Don’ts of Machine Learning in Computer Security' (USENIX Security 2022, Distinguished Paper Award), 'TESSERACT: Eliminating Experimental Bias in Malware Classification across Space and Time' (USENIX Security 2019), 'Intriguing Properties of Adversarial ML Attacks in the Problem Space' (IEEE S&P 2020), and 'Transcending Transcend: Revisiting Malware Classification in the Presence of Concept Drift' (IEEE S&P 2022). He received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2023 for robust explanations in malware detection and the Faculty Student Support Award in 2024. Pierazzi serves on program committees for IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, AAAI, and others, and reviews for IEEE TIFS and ACM TOPS.