Merve GÜLMEZ

Merve GÜLMEZ

Researcher

Merve GÜLMEZ

I am a security researcher at Ericsson and a PhD candidate at KU Leuven. My research focuses on memory-safety hardening and improving software resilience. I’m always happy to pitch ideas for master’s theses and PhD projects!

Feel free to reach out if you’re looking for guidance or collaboration!

2025

  • Long travels and great memories: our paper BLACKOUT was presented at ACM CCS 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. It was a pleasure to lead many discussions with industrial stakeholders and the CHERIoT community. I believe we created strong synergy with our co-authors.

  • I supervised Ruben Sturm during his summer internship at Ericsson Research. It was a productive summer, and although the paper is still in progress, I’m happy to share that he started his PhD at DistriNet!

  • Happy to give a webinar at hardwaresecurity.io, so the talk is here

  • Our paper “Do You Need Stack Canaries?” was presented at ARES 2025. Thanks to JT for handling the presentation, and great job Hugo! You can read the author version of the paper.

  • Enjoyed so much at IEEE S&P’25. Discussing all the different security aspects made me happy! Impressed me how many people are working on CHERI architecture. So Mon CHERI ❤️ can be found as an author version of paper, poster and presentation

  • Good news good news :) Mon CHERI paper got accepted to IEEE S&P. Time for travelling to San Francisco! You can read the earliest version here.

  • Happily joined the DSbD event in London with a use case on memory safety for telecommunicatiom systems. Have a look at our colorful poster

2024

  • We have been working on measuring the effectiveness of x86-64 shadow stacks. Our findings indicate that the stack layout can vary across different compilers, and the layout of stack canaries can impact on the effectiveness of the shadow stack. To learn more about our findings, check out our preprint -> Do we still need canaries in the coal mine? Measuring shadow stack effectiveness in countering stack smashing.

  • At Ericsson Research, we have assessed the suitability of CHERI for telecommunication systems that require high performance and fault tolerance. To learn more about our findings, check out our blog post

  • I have been working on CHERI for about a year. It has been a long and educational project for me. I worked on extending the qemu simulator, llvm compiler, Flute core, and CheriFreeRTOS. The preprint for “Mon CHÉRI: Mitigating Uninitialized Memory Access with Conditional Capabilities” is now available here.

  • I hosted Sacha Ruchlejmer from Phelma University as a master’s thesis student. He worked on adapting the secure and rewind discard project to the Arm Morello Board at Ericsson Research. He successfully defended his thesis and graduated from Phelma University; Congrats, Sacha 🎉 You can read his thesis -> Secure Rewind and Discard on Arm Morello.

  • Our paper, “System Call Interposition Without Compromise” has been accepted at DSN 2024! Here, you can check our library and artifact, lazypoline.

  • I had the privilege of speaking at FOSDEM 2024. You can find my talk is here

2023

2022