About me

My name is Constantinos Patsakis and currently I'm an associate professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus and adjunct researcher at the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) of Athena Research and Innovation Centre.

My first degree is in Mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece and then I continued with a M.Sc. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London. I obtained my PhD in Security from the Department of Informatics of University of Piraeus. My main areas of research include cryptography, security, privacy and data anonymization.

In the past I worked as Researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) of Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain, as a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin Ireland, and Senior Researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).

In this academic year I will be teaching the following courses:

Undergraduates

  • Information & Code theory
  • Security Governance
  • Introduction to Computer Science
  • Cryptography

Postgraduates

  • Digital Forensics & Malware Analysis
  • Cryptographic protocols
  • Cryptography
  • Introduction to Computer Science
  • Secure programming

For more info about the courses, students may refer to our GUNet. Dissertation topics can be found here.

Latest news

Some recent news regarding publications, projects, events, etc.

IPStorm Tracker

IPFS is currently plagued by IPStorm malware, a botnet which is exploits IPFS for communication of the nodes and sending commands to the infected devices. This webpage offers a daily tracker of the botnet with data collected directly collected from IPFS.

Journal of Information Security and Applications

The following work has been accepted for publication:
Constantinos Patsakis and Fran Casino: "Exploiting Statistical and Structural Features for the Detection of Domain Generation Algorithms".

Future Generation Computer Systems, Elsevier

The following work has been accepted for publication:
Theodoros Apostolopoulos, Vasilios Katos, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Constantinos Patsakis: Resurrecting anti-virtualization and anti-debugging: Unhooking your hooks. Future Generation Computer Systems

Analysing the fall 2020 Emotet campaign

University of Piraeus, Athena Research Center, and Neurosoft through its cybersecurity solution Neutrify, released a white paper on the latest campaign of Emotet, which had a significant impact in several countries worldwide. Follow this link to read it. The corrsponding IoCs are also provided for documents and C2 servers.

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

The following work has been accepted for publication:
Darren Hurley-Smith, Constantinos Patsakis, and Julio Hernandez-Castro, "On the unbearable lightness of FIPS 140-2 randomness tests".

Computers and Security, Elsevier

Our joined work with Fran Casino and Vasilios Katos on DNS and covert communications is accepted for publication.

IEEE Access

"A Survey on Privacy Properties for Data Publishing of Relational Data" with A. Zigomitros, F. Casino, and A. Solanas has been accepted for publication.

IEEE ACCESS

Fran Casino, Eugenia A. Politou, Efthimios Alepis, Constantinos Patsakis: "Immutability and Decentralized Storage: An Analysis of Emerging Threats"

R&D projects

A consolidated list of recent R&D projects I have been participating in the past few years.
glass

GLASS

H2020-DT-GOVERNANCE-05-2020

Ongoing

LOCARD

FCT-02-2018-2019

Ongoing

CyberSec4Europe

SU-ICT-03-2018

Ongoing

ΜΕΛΙΤΥ

ΕΠΑνΕΚ T1ΕΔΚ-01958

Ongoing

IntelTriage

ΕΠΑνΕΚ

Ongoing

Digital forensics: evidence analysis via intelligent systems and practices (DigForASP)

COST Action CA17124

Ongoing

YAKSHA

ICT-39-2016-2017

Ongoing

Datasets


Malicious MS Office documents dataset

A dataset with several thousands of tagged malicious and benign MS Office documents with dynamic features (e.g. VBA, DDE) and their extracted static features in CSV format. Available here.

Social Live Streaming Service Grooming dataset

A large-scale dataset of the messages exchanged publicly by the streamers and viewers during the live broadcasts of users identified as adult content producers from the LiveMe platform, a major Social Live Streaming Service (SLSS). The dataset comprises 39,382,838 chat messages exchanged by 1,428,284 users, in the context of 293,271 live broadcasts during a period of approximately two years, from July 2016 to June 2018. The analysis of this dataset can be found in our paper "Large-scale analysis of grooming in modern social networks" (arXiv:2004.08205 [cs.SI]). Available here.

Dictionary-based DGAs dataset

This repository contains a dataset for the research of domain generation algorithms (DGAs) and machine learning. More precisely, it targets dictionary-based DGAs. The associated paper is the following:
Constantinos Patsakis, Fran Casino: "Exploiting Statistical and Structural Features for the Detection of Domain Generation Algorithms", Journal of Information Security and Applications, 2021.
Available here.

The HYDRA dataset

This repository contains a large dataset for the research of domain generation algorithms (DGAs) and machine learning. At the time of writing the dataset contains more than 90m of domains and more than 100 families. The associated paper is the following:
Fran Casino, Nikolaos Lykousas, Ivan Homoliak, Constantinos Patsakis, Julio Hernandez-Castro: "Intercepting Hail Hydra: Real-Time Detection of Algorithmically Generated Domains"
Available here.

Publications

Contact details

Address:

Office 540, 5th floor
Department of Informatics
University of Piraeus
80, Karaoli & Dimitriou str.
Piraeus 18534, Greece.

Phone:

+30-210-414-2261

Hours:

Will be announced once the semister schedule is published by the university.