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

  • October 2025: Top Reviewer at AISec 2025
  • September 2025: Serving ACM WiSec 2026 as Web Chair
  • July 2025: I will serve the ACM CCS 2026 PC
  • July 2025: I will serve the IEEE SaTML 2026 PC
  • June 2025: I was granted the 2025 KIT's YIG Prep Pro Fellowship
  • June 2025: I will serve the ACM ASIACCS 2026 PC
  • May 2025: I will serve the Usenix Security 2026 PC
  • May 2025: I will serve the AISec 2025, co-located with ACM CCS 2025 PC
  • May 2025: I will serve the ARTMAN 2025, co-located with ACM CCS 2025 PC
  • May 2025: I will serve the STMUS 2025, co-located with ESORICS 2025 PC
  • January 2025: I will serve the WoRMA, co-located with IEEE EuroS&P 2025 PC
  • August 2024: I will serve the Usenix Security 2025 PC
  • 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

    Service

    Organizing Committee

    Program Committee

    Publications

     
    In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on CPS & IoT Security and Privacy (CPSIoTSec '26)

    "Physics-Informed Defenses against Poisoning Attacks on Learning-based Anomaly Detection in ICS"

    Simeon Großmann, Alessandro Erba, Christian Wressnegger

    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 the 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