Research

Pedro Fonseca leads the Reliable and Secure Systems Lab. He makes systems reliable and secure, and targets core software systems – the building blocks in modern computing that other software critically relies upon, such as operating systems, hypervisors, and distributed systems. He is the recipient of a NSF CAREER award, a Google Faculty Research award, and a Google Research Scholar award.

Before joining Purdue, he was a postdoc at the University of Washington, where he worked with Arvind Krishnamurthy, Hank Levy, and Xi Wang. He graduated from MPI-SWS and the University of Saarland, where he worked with Rodrigo Rodrigues.

Publications

• Faastion: Elastic and Scalable Native Library Isolation for High-Density Serverless Platforms [To appear]
  Miguel Lourenço, Rahul Kondlapudi, Serhii Ivanenko, Rodrigo Cidra, Pedro Fonseca, and Rodrigo Bruno.
  In the ACM SIGOPS Annual Technical Conference (ATC '26).
  
  
• Tamias: Feedback-Guided Systematic Concurrency Exploration for Transparent Distributed System Fuzzing [pdf]
  Congyu Liu, Yaoxu Song, Pedro Fonseca, and Yongle Zhang.
  In the 32nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'26).
  
  
• A Harmony of Ice and Fire: Mitigating Cold Last-Level Cache Effects in Serverless Computing on Commodity Hardware [pdf]
  Qi Ling, Ajay Rawat, Pedro Fonseca, and Kazem Taram.
  In the 59th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'26).
  
  
• Rose: Reproducing External-Fault-Induced Failures in Distributed Systems with Lightweight Instrumentation [pdf]
  Sebastião Amaro, Pedro Fonseca, and Miguel Matos.
  In the 21st USENIX EuroSys Conference 2026 (EuroSys'26).
  
  
• kSFS: Repurposing a Microkernel-like Interface for Fast and Secure In-Kernel Linux File Systems [pdf]
  Dinglan Peng and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 35th USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix Security'26).
  
  
• A Comprehensive Study of Concurrency Bugs in the Linux Kernel [pdf]
  Sishuai Gong, Chih-En Lin, Kevin Wu, Edwin Lu, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'26).
  
  
• UpFuzz: Detecting Data Format Incompatibility Bugs during Distributed Storage System Upgrade [pdf]
  🏆 Community Award 🏆
  Ke Han, Sruthi P C, Yayu Wang, Yaoxu Song, Bishal Basak Papan, Junwen Yang, Pedro Fonseca, and Yongle Zhang.
  In the 23rd USENIX Symposium on Network Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'26).
  
  
• KRR: Efficient and Scalable Kernel Record Replay [pdf]
  Tianren Zhang, Sishuai Gong, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 19th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'25).
  
  
• Snowplow: Effective Kernel Fuzzing with a Learned White-box Test Mutator [pdf]
  Sishuai Gong, Rui Wang, Deniz Altınbüken, Pedro Fonseca, and Petros Maniatis.
  In the 30th Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'25).
  
  
• Pegasus: Transparent and Unified Kernel-Bypass Networking for Fast Local and Remote Communication [pdf]
  Dinglan Peng, Congyu Liu, Tapti Palit, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Mona Vij, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 20th USENIX EuroSys Conference 2025 (EuroSys'25).
  
  
• Kaleidoscope: Precise Invariant-Guided Pointer Analysis [pdf]
  Tapti Palit and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 29th Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'24).
  
  
• Pronghorn: Effective Checkpoint Orchestration for Serverless Hot-Starts [pdf]
  Sumer Kohli, Shreyas Kharbanda, Rodrigo Bruno, Joao Carreira, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 19th USENIX EuroSys Conference 2024 (EuroSys'24).
  
  
• Veil: A Protected Services Framework for Confidential Virtual Machines [pdf]
  Adil Ahmad, Botong Ou, Congyu Liu, Xiaokuan Zhang, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 28th Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'23). Presented in ASPLOS'24.
  
  
• Snowcat: Efficient Kernel Concurrency Testing using a Learned Coverage Predictor [pdf]
  Sishuai Gong, Dinglan Peng, Deniz Altınbüken, Pedro Fonseca, and Petros Maniatis.
  In the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'23).
  
  
• An Extensible Orchestration and Protection Framework for Confidential Cloud Computing [pdf]
  Adil Ahmad, Alex Schultz, Byoungyoung Lee, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'23).
  
  
• μSWITCH: Fast Kernel Context Isolation with Implicit Context Switches [pdf]
  Dinglan Peng, Congyu Liu, Tapti Palit, Pedro Fonseca, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, and Mona Vij.
  In the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'23).
  
  
• Always-On Recording Framework for Serverless Computations: Opportunities and Challenges [pdf]
  Shreyas Kharbanda and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 1st Workshop on SErverless Systems, Applications and MEthodologies (SESAME'23).
  
  
• KIT: Testing OS-level Virtualization for Functional Interference Bugs [pdf]
  Congyu Liu, Sishuai Gong, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 28th Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'23).
  
  
• Snowboard: Finding Kernel Concurrency Bugs through Systematic Inter-thread Communication Analysis [pdf]
  Sishuai Gong, Deniz Altınbüken, Pedro Fonseca, and Petros Maniatis.
  In the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'21).
  
  
• From Warm to Hot Starts: Leveraging Runtimes for the Serverless Era [pdf]
  Joao Carreira, Sumer Kohli, Rodrigo Bruno, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 18th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'21).
  
  
• Reproducing Production Failures with Execution Reconstruction [pdf]
  Gefei Zuo, Jiacheng Ma, Andrew Quinn, Pramod Bhatotia, Pedro Fonseca, and Baris Kasikci.
  In the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 2021 (PLDI'21).
  
  
• On-Demand-Fork: A Microsecond Fork for Memory-Intensive and Latency-Sensitive Applications [pdf]
  Kaiyang Zhao, Sishuai Gong, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 16th USENIX EuroSys Conference 2021 (EuroSys'21).
  
  
• KARD: Lightweight Data Race Detection with Per-Thread Memory Protection [pdf]
  Adil Ahmad, Sangho Lee, Pedro Fonseca, and Byoungyoung Lee.
  In the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'21).
  
  
• SHARD: Fine-Grained Kernel Specialization with Context-Aware Hardening [pdf]
  Muhammad Abubakar, Adil Ahmad, Pedro Fonseca, and Dongyan Xu.
  In the USENIX Security Symposium 2021 (Usenix Security'21).
  
  
• CHANCEL: Efficient Multi-client Isolation Under Adversarial Programs [pdf]
  Adil Ahmad, Juhee Kim, Jaebaek Seo, Insik Shin, Pedro Fonseca, and Byoungyoung Lee.
  In the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2021 (NDSS'21).
  
  
• SoK: Understanding the Prevailing Security Vulnerabilities in TrustZone-assisted TEE Systems [pdf]
  David Cerdeira, Nuno Santos, Pedro Fonseca, and Sandro Pinto.
  In the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020 (S&P'20).
  
  
• Cirrus: A Serverless Framework for End-to-End ML Workflows [pdf]
  Joao Carreira, Pedro Fonseca, Alexey Tumanov, Andrew Zhang, and Randy Katz.
  In the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2019 (SoCC'19).
  
  
• A Case for Serverless Machine Learning [pdf]
  Joao Carreira, Pedro Fonseca, Alexey Tumanov, Andrew Zhang, and Randy Katz.
  In the Workshop on Systems for ML at NeurIPS 2018 (MLSYS'18).
  
  
• MultiNyx: A Multi-level Abstraction Framework for Systematic Analysis of Hypervisors [pdf] [slides]
  Pedro Fonseca, Xi Wang, and Arvind Krishnamurthy.
  In the 13th USENIX EuroSys Conference (EuroSys'18).
  
  
• Cntr: Lightweight OS Containers [pdf] [code]
  Jörg Thalheim, Pramod Bhatotia, Pedro Fonseca, and Baris Kasikci.
  In the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'18).
  
  
• An Empirical Study on the Correctness of Formally Verified Distributed Systems [pdf] [slides]
  Pedro Fonseca, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xi Wang, and Arvind Krishnamurthy.
  In the 12th USENIX EuroSys Conference (EuroSys'17).
  
  
• Diamond: Automating Data Management and Storage for Wide-area, Reactive Applications [pdf] [code]
  Irene Zhang, Niel Lebeck, Pedro Fonseca, Brandon Holt, Raymond Cheng, Ariadna Norberg, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Henry M. Levy.
  In the 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'16).
  
  
• iThreads: A Threading Library for Parallel Incremental Computation [pdf]
  Pramod Bhatotia, Pedro Fonseca, Umut Acar, Björn Brandenburg, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
  In the 20th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'15).
  
  
• SKI: Exposing Kernel Concurrency Bugs through Systematic Schedule Exploration [pdf] [slides] [code]
  Pedro Fonseca, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Björn Brandenburg.
  In the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'14)
  
  
• Composing OS Extensions Safely and Efficiently with Bascule [pdf]
  Andrew Baumann, Dongyoon Lee, Pedro Fonseca, Lisa Glendenning, Jacob R. Lorch, Barry Bond, Reuben Olinsky, and Galen C. Hunt.
  In the 7th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'13).
  
  
• Fighting Cybercrime with Packet Attestation [pdf]
  Andreas Haeberlen, Pedro Fonseca, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Peter Druschel.
  Technical Report MPI-SWS-2011-002, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, July 2011.
  
  
• Finding Complex Concurrency Bugs in Large Multi-Threaded Applications [pdf]
  Pedro Fonseca, Cheng Li, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
  In the 5th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'11).
  
  
• A Study of the Internal and External Effects of Concurrency Bugs [pdf]
  Pedro Fonseca, Cheng Li, Vishal Singhal, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
  In the 40th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'10).
  
  
• Zeno: Eventually Consistent Byzantine Fault Tolerance [pdf]
  Atul Singh, Pedro Fonseca, Petr Kuznetsov, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Petros Maniatis.
  In the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'09).
  
  
• Full-Information Lookups for Peer-to-Peer Overlays
  Pedro Fonseca, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Anjali Gupta, and Barbara Liskov.
  In the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), vol. 20, no. 9, September 2009.
  
  
• Defining Weakly Consistent Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Services [pdf]
  Atul Singh, Pedro Fonseca, Petr Kuznetsov, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Petros Maniatis.
  In the Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS'08).
  

Selected Service

Teaching

• Systems Seminar
• CS503: Operating Systems
• CS592: Reliable and Secure Systems
• CS497: Honors Research Project
• CS408: Software Testing

Contact