Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies

Institute

IMATI is the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, Organized on three branches:

Pavia (HQ);

Milano;

Genova.

Mission:

develop competencies in the applied mathematics and informatics for solving societal and engineering challenges.  

Personnel

  • Silvia Bertoluzza 
  • Luca Caviglione
  • Matteo Repetto 
  • Fabrizio Ruggeri 
  • Marco Zuppelli (PhD Student)

Expertise

  • Information Hiding:
    • stegomalware and mitigation of network covert channels; 
    • threat-independent detection frameworks (local and network covert channels);
    • wavelet and image processing techniques for detecting steganographic contents;
    • energy-based anomaly detection algorithms. 
  • Monitoring and Inspection techniques: 
    • security issues of virtualized systems and digital services;
    • framework for detecting attacks in cloud and complex interplays of APIs;
    • detection frameworks based on cloud/edge paradigms. 
  • Machine Learning:
    • adversarial classifiers (e.g., spam detection);
    • Bayesian analysis; 
    • unsupervised/semi-supervised learning for detection and de-anonymizing attacks. 

Projects

  • SIMARGL – Secure Intelligent Methods for Advanced Recognition of Malware and Stegomalware (Grant Agreement No 833042):
    • efficient and scalable methodologies for detecting network covert channels and multi-stage loading architecture based on the Invoke-PSImage threat. 
  • ASTRID – AddreSsing ThReats for virtualIzeD services (Grant Agreement No 786922):
    • flexible and efficient inspection mechanisms for virtual services. 
  • GUARD – a cyber-security framework to GUArantee Reliability and trust for Digital service chains (Grant Agreement No 833456 ):
    • new cybersecurity paradigms for building analytics and detection services over multi-domain business chains.

Initiatives/Assets

  • Criminal Use of Information Hiding (CUIng – cuing.org): founding members and part of the steering committee. 
  • NATO IST-ET 117 – Data Hiding in Information Warfare Operations.
  • Worms Distributed Covert Channel Detection Framework (WoDiCof – https://wodicof.ztt.hs-worms.de). 
  • PhD Program in Security, Risk and Vulnerability – University of Genova: Board Member and Lecturer. 
  • Start 4.0 Competence Center (https://www.start4-0.it).