About Me

PhD student in Computer Science

I am a PhD student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science. I am advised by Dr. Nils Ole Tippenhauer, working in the Scy-Phy group.
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.

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