About Me

Postdoctoral Researcher

I am a postdoc working with Prof. Dr. Christian Wressnegger in the Intellisec group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). I earned my PhD in computer science from Saarland University working at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in the Scy-Phy group led by Dr. Nils Ole Tippenhauer.
My research interest includes Cyber-Physical Systems Security, Anomaly Detection, and Adversarial Machine Learning. I am working on adversarial examples against anomaly detectors for Industrial Control Systems, industrial protocol security (e.g., OPC UA), and autonomous vehicles security (e.g., Drones).
During my PhD studies, I was visiting student at the Cyber-Physical Security Lab (CPSec) with Prof. Saman Zonouz at Georgia Institute of Technology.
I hold Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. During my master's, I spent seven months as a visiting student at the iTrust lab, Singapore University of Technology and Design.

News

  • May 2024: Excited to start as Postdoc at KIT!
  • April 2024: I successfully defended my PhD thesis!
  • April 2024: Excited to share that I have been selected to participate to the CPS Rising Stars workshop. Looking forward to visit UVA in Charlottesville and network with fellow researchers in the area of CPS.

Publications

Best Paper Award
In proceeding of 20th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA) 2023

"White-box Concealment Attacks Against Anomaly Detectors for Cyber-Physical Systems"

Alessandro Erba, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

In proceeding of th ACM Cyber-Physical System Security Workshop (CPSS 2023)

"Blind Concealment from Reconstruction-based Attack Detectors for Industrial Control Systems via Backdoor Attacks"

Tim Walita, Alessandro Erba, John H. Castellanos, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

Distinguished Paper with Artifacts Award
In proceeding of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2022

"Assessing Model-free Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems Against Generic Concealment Attacks"

Alessandro Erba, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

Best Paper Award
In proceeding of CPS & IoT Security and Privacy (CPSIoTSec2022)

"Security Analysis of Vendor Implementations of the OPC UA Protocol for Industrial Control Systems"

Alessandro Erba, Anne Müller, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

In proceeding of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2020

"Constrained Concealment Attacks against Reconstruction-based Anomaly Detectors in Industrial Control Systems"

Alessandro Erba, Riccardo Taormina, Stefano Galelli, Marcello Pogliani, Michele Carminati, Stefano Zanero, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

In proceeding of The Joint Workshop on CPS & IoT Security and Privacy (CPSIoTSec2020)

"A Statistical Analysis Framework for ICS Process Datasets"

Federico Turrin, Alessandro Erba, Nils Ole Tippenhauer, Mauro Conti

Talks

BlackHat Europe 2021

"Resting on Feet of Clay: Securely Bootstrapping OPC UA Deployments"

Alessandro Erba, Anne Müller, Nils Ole Tippenhauer