Alessandro Erba

About Me

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 (Dr.-Ing.) 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 currently working on the security of Industrial Control Sytems, and Autonomous Vehicles. Specifically focusing on adversarial examples for CPS anomaly detectors, industrial protocol security, security of embedded microcontrollers for Autonomous UAVs and Reinforcement Learning for adversarial control.
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

  • June 2024: I will serve the IEEE SatML 2025 PC
  • June 2024: I will serve the AIsec 2024 PC
  • June 2024: I will serve the ACNS 2025 PC
  • June 2024: My PhD thesis is available online
  • 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.

    • Grants & Awards

    Publications

     
    In Proceedings of the 2025 USENIX Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (VehicleSec '25)

    "ConfuSense: Sensor Reconfiguration Attacks for Stealthy UAV Manipulation"

    Alessandro Erba, John H. Castellanos, Sahil Sihag, Saman Zonouz, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

    Best Paper Award
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Workshop on Re-design Industrial Control Systems
    with Security (RICSS '24)

    "On Practical Realization of Evasion Attacks for Industrial Control Systems"

    Alessandro Erba, Andres F. Murillo, Riccardo Taormina, Stefano Galelli, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

    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 Artifact
    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