Adriaan Jacobs

I am a systems security researcher and PhD student at the DistriNet research group of KU Leuven in Ghent (Belgium), under supervision of prof. Stijn Volckaert. My research focuses on compiler-enabled security hardening of memory-unsafe code.

Before starting my PhD in late 2021, I completed my M.Sc. in Engineering Technology at KU Leuven. My Master’s thesis was on Combating Address-Sensitive Behavior in Multi-Variant Execution Environments.

2026

• Our paper, N00B: Bounds Checking for the Masses got accepted to CCS’26! Many thanks to my collaborators Carlo Ramponi, Jonas Roels, Bruno Crispo, Silviu Vlasceanu, Mahmoud Ammar, and Stijn Volckaert.
• Happy to serve on the EuroS&P’26 Poster Committee. Thanks Dimitris for the invitation!
• Attended the Huawei Trustworthiness Summit in Helsinki.
• Organized the 4th DistriNet Compiler Meetup in Leuven. Thanks to Hans and Daan for hosting, and to all speakers and attendees for the enthusiasm!
• Glad to give a remote talk on Bounds Checking for the Masses: Towards Practical Exploit Mitigation in the Data-Only Attack Era​ for the Ericsson compiler team in Texas. Thanks Merve and Thomas for the opportunity!

2025

• Organized the 3rd DistriNet LLVM Meetup at the iGent building in Gent. Thanks to Bart Coppens for hosting, and thanks to everyone who attended, brought posters, or delivered presentations!
• After an involved shepherding process, our work on Partial Multi-Variant Execution made it to EuroS&P’25. Congrats Jonas The Elder!
• Accompanied Stijn to the 10th AMSec Workshop in Amsterdam to talk about our bounds checking work (N00B), under submission at the time. Congrats to Enrico Barberis for also defending his PhD that day!
• Both our EuroSec’25 papers got accepted!
  1. Jonas Jr. shows that CUDA is much more exploitable than previously thought: CUDA, Woulda, Shoulda: Returning Exploits in a SASS-y World (UPDATE: 🎉 Best Paper Award 🎉)
  2. Anton finally addresses the ASB elephant in the MVX room: Diagnosing and Neutralizing Address-Sensitive Behavior in Multi-Variant Execution Systems

2024

• Ended the year with a 4-month internship at Huawei’s TTE Lab in the Munich Research Center. Many thanks to Silviu Vlasceanu and Mahmoud Ammar for the great experience, and to all other students in the group for the warm welcome! Check out the resulting CCS’26 paper N00B!
• Presented Not Quite Write, our critical assessment of store-only bounds checkers, at WOOT’24 in Philadelphia! Slides here.
• Happy to attend DSN in Brisbane, and present our lazypoline syscall interposer to fellow systems researchers. You can find the slides here!
• Organized the 2nd DistriNet LLVM Meetup at our campus in Gent, and gave a talk on MPK permission switching optimizations (joint work with Jeroen Gardeyn). Thanks to all presenters and attendees for joining!
• Not Quite Write: On the Effectiveness of Store-Only Bounds Checking is accepted at WOOT’24. On to more secure integrity-only protection schemes!
• Our paper, System Call Interposition Without Compromise, is accepted at DSN’24! Thanks to Merve Gülmez, Alicia Andries, Stijn Volckaert, and Alexios Voulimeneas for the great collaboration. You can find the code here.

2023

• The ACACES summer school in Fiuggi was a blast! Thanks to HiPEAC for organizing, and the speakers & attendees for the engaging discussions.
• Attended EuroLLVM in Glasgow. Saw bounds checking go mainstream through Yeoul Na’s keynote!
• Delivered a talk on Hoisting and Deleting Redundant Instrumentation at the IR Level at the 1st DistriNet LLVM Meetup. Thanks to Dominique for the initiative, and thanks Hans for hosting!
• Great experience joining the Shadow Program Committee of EuroSys’23. Interesting discussions with other researchers about exciting new work, and great opportunity to get to know the academic review process better.

2022

• Happy to serve on the USENIX Security’22 Artifact Evaluation Committee.

2021

• Graduated Magna Cum Laude from the M.Sc. in Engineering Technology at KU Leuven’s Group T campus.
• Successfully defended my Master’s thesis, Combating Address-Sensitive Behavior in MVEEs. Received 18.9/20.

2020

• Concluded a 10-week summer internship at ST Engineering iDirect in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. Great to work with such enthusiastic colleagues in the Device Software Engineering team.
  • Developed a PoC high performance kernel bypass packet processing library using Linux XDP.
  • Backported OverlayFS to older kernel versions and implemented SquashFS + OverlayFS across the entire device software product range.