Valentin Wüstholz

Valentin is a software security researcher at ConsenSys Diligence and has held positions both in academia (at ETH Zürich and UT Austin) and in industry (at Microsoft and Google). He is passionate about developing tools and techniques that allow us to produce more reliable and correct software. A recent example of such a tool is the Harvey fuzzer for Ethereum smart contracts. It was acquired by ConsenSys in 2018 and was integrated into the MythX smart contract analysis service and powers the Diligence fuzzing service. Harvey is also regularly used in audits and client engagements.

In 2015, he received a Ph.D. from ETH Zürich (advisor: Prof. Dr. Peter Müller) for developing a practical program analysis technique that leverages both static and dynamic analysis by exchanging partial verification results. After completing his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin in the group of Prof. Dr. Işil Dillig, a visiting researcher at Microsoft (Redmond, WA), and a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich in the group of Prof. Dr. Peter Müller.

As a graduate and undergraduate student, he did internships at both Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA), where he was working with Dr. Rustan Leino, and Google (Santa Monica, CA). He received a Master's degree (2009) and a Bachelor's degree (2008) in Computer Science from ETH Zürich.

Over the past few years, he has been striving to make formal program analysis techniques more accessible in practice. On one hand, he has published papers at top venues in the area of program analysis, formal methods and software security (see DBLP and Google Scholar for more details), three of which received best paper awards (at FM 2011, ICSE 2016, and TACAS 2017). On the other hand, he has been a lead developer for several program analysis tools and has been contributing to various other program analysis tools, such as Boogie, Clousot, Dafny, and Spec#.

In addition, he has been active in the research community by, among others, mentoring students and interns, being a teaching assistant for more than a dozen courses, and reviewing papers for top conferences, such as ICSE, PLDI, and CAV.