Double recognition for the Software Engineering Unit at the Buenos Aires International Conference on Program Comprehension.

The article outlines the operational methodologies and evidence gained from the activities carried out in the second part of the more complex ASPIRE (Advanced Software Protection: Integration, Research and Exploitation) project, of which Mariano Ceccato is coordinator for FBK. The European Commission had rated it “excellent”.

“In this second phase of the project, we worked alongside professional hackers, having them attack applications protected by ASPIRE security systems – the words of the Software Engineering Unit researcher -. The experiments led us to understand many important elements that will enable us to achieve even more robust security systems in the future. How hackers move and how hackers work, where attackers encounter more difficulties, what their limits are, what kind of tools they use, what kind of attack strategies they adopt: we have managed to reconstruct these dynamics very well, so today we know how to build Innovative and effective protection systems “.

But that’s not all. For Ceccato, the results contained in the article that was awarded in Buenos Aires marks an important stage in IT security research.

“It is a unique study of its kind, there is no other like it in literature,” the researcher goes on. Focusing on consolidated dynamics and strategies has opened up a new frontier for research. We have somehow identified the directions of the future, the possible new issues; having answered the current questions we have opened the way for new questions; we have had a glimpse of new problems to be solved. “