Profile picture of Hugo Lefeuvre

Systems and security researcher, free software hacker.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia with Margo Seltzer.

Earlier, I did my PhD with Pierre Olivier at the University of Manchester. My PhD thesis received the 2025 EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award for the best European PhD thesis in computer systems. I was a Microsoft 2022 PhD Research Fellow. I visited/interned at SCI Semiconductor, MSR Cambridge, and NEC Labs Europe between 2020 and 2024.

I am currently on the academic job market. I am looking for an Assistant Professor position to pursue my work on systems and security.

Research

As a systems security researcher, my goal is to make software faster and safer. Some of my core research topics include operating systems, isolation (and more specifically compartmentalization, virtualization, and confidential computing), and specialization.

My research is by nature inter-disciplinary, so I often touch on aspects of networking, embedded systems, architecture, programming languages, software engineering, and formal verification.

Selected Publications

Full list on DBLP or Google Scholar.

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

Selected Community Service

Free Software

Free software is one of my core values. I have been active in various free software communities for over a decade. I contributed to many free-software projects, including the Linux kernel, but most notably:

Nowadays, my free software contributions are centered on CHERIoT, Unikraft, and my other research projects.

Some links

Projects I work/worked on:

Other research I find exciting. Not mine, but really cool!