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

• Pegasus: Transparent and Unified Kernel-Bypass Networking for Fast Local and Remote Communication
  Dinglan Peng, Congyu Liu, Tapti Palit, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Mona Vij, and Pedro Fonseca.
  In the 20th USENIX EuroSys Conference 2025 (EuroSys'25). To appear.
  
  
• 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 2018).
  
  
• Cntr: Lightweight OS Containers [pdf] [code]
  Jörg Thalheim, Pramod Bhatotia, Pedro Fonseca, and Baris Kasikci.
  In the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC 2018).
  
  
• 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 2017).
  
  
• 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 2016).
  
  
• 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 2015).
  
  
• 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 2014)
  
  
• 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 2013).
  
  
• 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 2011).
  
  
• 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 2010).
  
  
• 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 2008).
  

Selected Service

Teaching

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

Contact