Gianluca De Stefano

Gianluca De Stefano

| | | destgianluca@gmail.com

Spoken languages: Italian Flag British Flag German Flag

About Me

I'm deeply passionate about artificial intelligence and its transformative potential, especially at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. My current focus is on developing large AI Agents capable of autonomously identifying and patching software vulnerabilities. With hands-on experience in applying machine learning to critical security tasks such as code and data analysis, as well as vulnerability detection, I bring a practical and solution-driven approach to my work. I stay actively engaged with the latest advancements in AI, driven by a strong interest in their security implications and their power to automate complex processes.

Experience

Security Researcher

Saarbrücken | CISPA

2022 - Present

I am currently a PhD student at the Helmholtz Center for Information Security. I research the security implications of the latest AI techniques as well as their possible application to existing challenges in the security space. In my studies I've had the chance to gain experience with: code generation models, weaknesses in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, as well as the application of ML/LLMs to various security tasks such as vulnerability detection, code analysis or data distillation.

View Publications

Research Internship

Saarbrücken | CISPA

2021 - 2022

During this internship I've researched, developed and deployed a machine learning pipeline for clustering and studying malicious documents. The pipeline is based on a Siamese NN and was used to process 4+ Million PDFs. Paper

Master thesis

Trento | MMLab

2020 - 2021

As part of my final theiss I've developed a novel adversarial attack to fool deep learning based media forensic tools. The attack is meant to hide tampering in images and also add false detections to missled the attention of hujman and automatic inspectors. Paper

Fullstack Developer

Trento | Prima Pubblicitá

2018 - 2021

I've held this position during my studies. As a Fullstack Developer, I was responsible for developing and maintaining web applications, building functionalities on top of existing platforms and engineering solutions to meet client needs. Suring my work here I've gained experience in managing large legacy DBs, optimizing systems to improve performance and scalability.

Pizza delivery guy

Trento | Pizza & Pizza

2016 - 2018

I worked here during my university studies. One delivery to a cryogenics lab and I woke up in the year 3000. Best delivery ever 🚀.

Junior research assistant

Trento | FBK

2015

2 weeks long summer internship at the FBK lab in Trento, where I worked on a project related to robotics.