My name is George (Yorgos) Argyros, and I am a recent Ph.D. graduate from Columbia University. I am generally interested in program analysis and verification, machine learning, security, cryptography and any combination of these fields.

In the distant past, I used to do a lot of applied security such as penetration testing, source code auditing and exploit development. During my undergraduate studies in the University of Athens, I was lucky enough to be advised by Aggelos Kiayias with whom I worked in various cryptography projects and mainly on the fun topic of randomness attacks against PHP applications. These attacks affected a number of popular PHP projects such as Joomla, Wikipedia and overall affected approximately 10% of internet applications.

During my Ph.D. at Columbia University, I was advised by professors Angelos Keromytis and Tal Malkin. My work revolved mostly around program analysis and bug finding techniques ranging from symbolic execution for interpreted languages to learning-based methods for testing, with a short interlude of attacking location-based services. Our location attacks affected a number of popular services such as Facebook, Tinder, Foursquare and resulted in a bug-bounty award from Facebook. Our bug-finding techniques resulted in the discovery of over 30 vulnerabilities in security critical components such as Web Application Firewalls and SSL/TLS libraries.

For more information on my work, check out my projects and publications.

The artistic depiction of myself in the picture, was quickly made by the talented artist and good friend Yannis Selimiotis.