Luca Demetrio - Research Director - Assistant professor (RTDa)

Luca Demetrio is Assistant Professor at the University of Genoa. He obtained his Ph.D.in 2021, and his thesis, “Formalizing Evasion Attacks against Security Detectors” revolves around the formulation and application of adversarial attacks in cyber-security contexts, where strict domain constraints need to be applied.

Between 2021 and 2022, he worked as a postdoc at the PRA Lab, University of Cagliari, while also collaborating for the company Pluribus One.
In 2023, he received an honorable mention “Premio Giovani Ricercatori” from the “Gruppo 2003” for his research on adversarial attacks against Windows malware detectors. In 2024, he also was appointed Associate Editor for the journal Pattern Recognition.

As research interests, Luca Demetrio is investigating the principal issues that hinders the security of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, with strong emphasis on their applications in the Cyber Security domain. With his seminal work on top-tier international journals (TIFS, TOPS), he highlighted how novel machine-learning threat detectors can be easily deceived by injecting minimal perturbations inside malware, potentially harming end-user devices.

On top of this results, Luca is also studying how to turn these weaknesses into resources for defenders that want to improve the security of their solutions. Such can be achieved not only by studying the possible countermeasures, but also by improving the evaluation process that machine learning algorithms must endure before being deployed in production.

Recent talks

Research interests

Active research projects