🏛️ Research Activity

My research is focused on the field of Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence, with a particular interest in the following topics:

• Machine Learning for Security
• Software Security
• Vulnerability Detection and Reverse Engineering
• Adversarial Machine Learning

As a Ph.D. candidate, I am mainly working on the Google.org Tech for Social Good impact challenge, building tools for small and medium-sized enterprises to improve their cybersecurity posture. My advisor is Prof. Michele Carminati. The research group has other two faculty members: Prof. Stefano Zanero and Prof. Stefano Longari.

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🏢️ Work Experience

• Apple - Security Research Intern
  location_on Paris, Île-de-France 🇫🇷

  calendar_month Late February to September 2026

  schedule 7 months

  topic Software Protections and Obfuscation in mobile applications (iOS)

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  FairPlay Red Team - Apple Services Engineering

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💻 Main Projects

Here are some of the main projects I have worked on outside of my research activity:

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📜 Publications

• Gabriele Digregorio, Roberto Alessandro Bertolini, Francesco Panebianco, Mario Polino.
  "Poster: libdebug, Build Your Own Debugger for a Better (Hello) World". In proceedings of ACM CCS 2024, October 14–18, 2024, Salt Lake City, UT, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3658644.3691391.
• Francesco Panebianco, Andrea Isgrò, Stefano Longari, Stefano Zanero, and Michele Carminati.
  "Guessing As A Service: Large Language Models Are Not Yet Ready For Vulnerability Detection". Joint National Conference on Cybersecurity (ITASEC & SERICS 2025), February 3-7, 2025, Bologna, Italy. Paper
  
• Francesco Panebianco, Mario D'Onghia, Stefano Zanero, and Michele Carminati.
  "How Stealthy is Stealthy? Studying the Efficacy of Black-Box Adversarial Attacks in the Real World". In: Nemec Zlatolas, L., Rannenberg, K., Welzer, T., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (eds) ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection. SEC 2025. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 746. Springer, Cham. Maribor, Slovenia, May 21-23, 2025. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-92886-4_10. Proceedings.
  
• Marco Di Gennaro, Francesco Panebianco, Marco Pianta, Stefano Zanero, Michele Carminati.
  "Amatriciana: Exploiting Temporal GNNs for Robust and Efficient Money Laundering Detection". Workshop on AI for Financial Crime Fight @ IEEE ICDM 2024, December 9-12, 2024, Abu Dhabi, UAE. DOI: 10.1109/ICDMW65004.2024.00039. Proceedings.
• Francesco Panebianco, Stefano Bonfanti, Francesco Trovò, and Michele Carminati.
  "LeakSealer: A Semisupervised Defense for LLMs Against Prompt Injection and Leakage Attacks". arXiv:2508.00602, 2025. arXiv.
• Lorenzo Bossi, Federico Saccani, Francesco Panebianco, Antonio Maci, Stefano Zanero, Stefano Longari, and Michele Carminati.
  "Towards Automated Cyber Threat Intelligence Elicitation in Underground Forums". arXiv:2608.23185, 2026. arXiv.
• Francesco Panebianco, Nicolò Amigoni, Gabriele Ruini, Tommaso Paladini, Stefano Longari, Stefano Zanero, and Michele Carminati.
  "Enhancing CTI Awareness of Small and Medium Enterprises with LLMs and Knowledge Graphs". In Proceedings of the Joint National Conference on Cybersecurity (ITASEC & SERICS 2026) (pp. 1-20). Paper.

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🏳️ CTF Competitions

Category: /pwn /rev Tower of Hanoi since Sep. 2023 mhackeroni since May 2024 Major Competitions: DEF CON 32 CTF Quals (7th place) DEF CON 32 CTF Finals (6th place) DEF CON 33 CTF Quals (3rd place) DEF CON 33 CTF Finals (6th place) DEF CON 34 CTF Quals (4th place)

    Challenge Author

        Author of the following challenges:

	ToH CTF 2025 Challenges: Forsaken Tower - /pwn Retro Mania - /rev Look at the Time! - /misc
	Ctrl+Space 2025 Challenges: Lone Explorer - /rev

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🏆 Awards

• ACM CCS 2024 - Best Poster Award (read post)
• ACM CCS 2024 - Community's Choice Poster Award (read post)

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🛠️ Smaller Projects

🛰 Landing Page for ctrl+space CTF (2025)	Landing page designer for the ctrl+space CTF Quals and Finals. A CTF in space, organized by the European Space Agency (ESA), D-Orbit, and mhackeroni.
The Feline Paradox (2023)	A Unity 3D game developed in a semester for PoliMi Game Collective (team Iellows). Roles: Lead Developer, AI Developer, UI Artist, Shader Artist.
📻 pyRAIsrc (2022)	Python library to encode and decode the now deprecated INRIM time signal.
H.E.V. Suit Mod for Half Life Alyx - Source 2 VScript (2020)	A steam workshop mod for Half-Life: Alyx to simulate the HEV Suit from Half-Life 2.
VR Gravity Gloves Unity Tech Demo (2020)	A basic implementation of the Gravity Gloves from Half-Life: Alyx in Unity. It uses the legacy SteamVR API on Unity 2019.3.7f1.
Hydrogen Tech - Minecraft 1.7.2 (2014)	An addon mod for IndustrialCraft 2 that adds a new power system based on electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Uses Minecraft Forge 1.7.2-10.12.1.1060
Time Leap (2016)	A small game made in RPG Maker VX Ace with PRISMA Produzioni (Italian localization only).

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🎮 Gaming Recommendations

Here are some of my favorite games in no particular order:

• Black Mesa and the Half Life series
• Portal and Portal 2
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• The Urbz: Sims in The City (Game Boy Advance)
• The Assassin's Creed Series
• Satisfactory
• Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 to release 1.7.10
• Boneworks
• Beat Saber
• Stardew Valley

🗺️ Adventure Games

(they deserve a separate section)

• Technobabylon
• Ace Attorney series
• Sam and Max series
• Blackwell Series
• The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2
• Loom

And last but not least, a very special mention for the game that got me into programming:
WarioWare D.I.Y. for the Nintendo DS.