● Trento, IT → Saarbrücken, DE
PhD Candidate/CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security /advisor: Prof. Dr. Thorsten Holz
Security researcher working on fuzzing, automated testing, and vulnerability discovery — building tools that find the inputs a program's authors never imagined, and the bugs that follow.
Biography
Matteo Leonelli is a Ph.D. fellow at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, supervised by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Holz. Prior to this, he earned an M.Eng. in Security from Saarland University (2024) and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Trento (2021). His research focuses on fuzzing, automated testing, and vulnerability discovery, with a particular emphasis on novel approaches for detecting unusual behaviors and bug classes.
Publications
THEMIS: Context-Aware Grey-box Fuzzing for WordPress Plugins
IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
TwinFuzz: Differential Testing of Video Hardware Acceleration Stacks
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
Secure Pull Printing with QR Codes and National eID Cards: A Software-oriented Design and an Open-source Implementation
ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY)
Pull Printing with National eID Cards: An Open-source and Software-oriented Implementation
Italian Conference on Cybersecurity (ITASEC)
Experience
Ph.D. Candidate
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University
Research on functional and security-focused automated fuzz testing for complex system security, with work published at EuroS&P and NDSS and multiple CVEs discovered in widely-deployed software.
Applied Scientist Intern
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Paris
Designed and implemented automated fuzz testing pipelines to evaluate and ensure data integrity in Amazon S3, applying grey-box fuzzing techniques to large-scale distributed cloud storage infrastructure.
Research Assistant
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University
Collaborated with Ph.D. researchers on automated root cause analysis of fuzzer-discovered bugs and on LLM-driven automatic fuzzing harness generation.
Master's Thesis
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University
Research on software and hardware fuzzing in collaboration with Intel.
Bachelor Thesis
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
Research resulting in the CODASPY'21 paper on secure pull printing with QR codes and national eID cards.
IoT Security Risk Assessment — CySec Project
Bitahoy, Saarbrücken
Assessed IoT device security using Wireshark to capture and analyze network traffic for malicious payloads, and built infrastructure to automatically cluster and flag suspicious activity in network logs.
Junior Researcher
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
Designed authentication protocols using the Italian CIE 3.0 smart card standard.
Full Stack Developer
Matrix Tech, Trento
Developed a full-stack web service for access control and real-time occupancy monitoring, integrated with proprietary embedded hardware.
Developer
OGP
Developed customer-facing websites and integrated new features.
Software Developer Intern
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Security & Trust Lab, Trento
Mobile developer internship focused on secure application development.
Java Developer Intern
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Smart Community Lab, Trento
Java developer involved in data analysis and software development.
Education
Ph.D. in Cybersecurity
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany
M.Eng. in Cybersecurity
Saarland University, Germany
B.Sc. in Computer Science
University of Trento, Italy
High School Diploma in Computer Science
Marconi Rovereto, Italy
Achievements & CVEs
Miscellaneous
Teaching
Research Assistant Mentor
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Bachelor's Thesis Supervisor
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Teaching Assistant — System Security
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Teaching Assistant — Security
University of Saarland
Teaching Assistant — Human Computer Interaction
University of Saarland
Teaching Assistant — Programming 1
University of Trento