Herbert Bos

Herbert Bos obtained his Master’s degree from Twente University and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Since then, he has worked extensively on dependable and efficient I/O architectures for operating systems like Linux, but also research systems based on MINIX 3. He is currently a professor at the VUSec Systems Security and Research Group in the department of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His main research field is systems security.

With his group, he discovered and analyzed many vulnerabilities in both hardware and software. From buggy memory chips to vulnerable CPUs, and from flaws in operating systems to novel exploitation techniques, the research has led to fixes in most major operating systems, most popular browsers, and all modern Intel processors. He believes that offensive research is valuable because the main reason for today’s security problems is that systems have become so complex that we no longer understand them. By investigating how we can make systems behave in unintended ways, we learn more about their (real) nature. Armed with this knowledge, developers can then improve their designs in the future. Indeed, while sophisticated new attacks tend to feature prominently in the media, Herbert spends most of his time on developing defensive techniques to improve the security.

His (former) students are all awesome and much cleverer than he is. With them, he has won 5 Pwnie Awards at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Moreover, 5 of his students have won the ACM SIGOPS EuroSys Roger Needham Award for best European Ph.D. thesis in systems, 2 of them have won the ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award for best Ph.D. thesis in security, and 2 more won the William C. Carter Ph.D. Dissertation Award for their work on dependability. Herbert worries about climate change and loves the Beatles.