My research

Here I try to keep an updated list of my involvement in research. Currently, I am a cybersecurity researcher at Thales, in the cybersecurity lab of CortAIx Labs.

Publications

2026

WasmStone: Enabling Transparent Execution of Standalone WebAssembly Applications in Keystone
Quentin Michaud, Lukas Hertel, Louis Cailliot, Dhouha Ayed, Olivier Levillain, and Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro
In the 21st International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES26)
paper - official link

2025

Abstraction of Trusted Execution Environments as the Missing Layer for Broad Confidential Computing Adoption: A Systematization of Knowledge
Quentin Michaud, Sara Ramezanian, Dhouha Ayed, Olivier Levillain, and Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro
preprint submitted at ACM Computing Surveys
paper - current link

2024

Securing Stack Smashing Protection in WebAssembly Applications
Quentin Michaud, Yohan Pipereau, Olivier Levillain, and Dhouha Ayed
In the 19th Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 24)
paper - official link

Robust Stack Smashing Protection for WebAssembly
Quentin Michaud, Yohan Pipereau, Olivier Levillain and Dhouha Ayed
In 2024 IEEE Future Networks World Forum (FNWF 24)
paper - official link

Other academic activities

External referee for the 30th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 25)
Member of the Technical Program Committee for the first IEEE/IFIP WebAssembly, Cloud and Edge: Shaping the Future of Computing (WACE 25) Workshop
Co-organizer of the Cybersecurity on a Plate (CoaP) monthly seminar, regrouping local research actors for sharing work on cybersecurity, 2023-2026.

Teaching

As a PhD student, then as a cybersecurity researcher coming from the industry, I teach courses on various topics revolving around cybersecurity. I make a point of open-sourcing the courses I give for easy reuse and sharing.

Introduction to pentesting (2026, course for M2 students): the challenges are not open so the students can stay surprised :)
Crash course on understanding and using containers (2025 - 2026, course for MS students): course
Introduction to memory bugs and exploitation (2024 - 2026, course for M2 students): course, lab and lab infrastructure (with related blog post)
CI for security and security for CI (2024 - 2026, course for M1 students): course and example project
Wasm / WASI, a new binary format (2023, course for M2 students): course + lab

Before that, I started teaching by giving courses to volunteer students as part of the HackademINT cybersecurity club:

Container breakout (2023, in French, HackademINT course): course and challenges
Server Side Template injection (2022, in French, course for the Hackcess club): course and lab
and other various formations on pentesting, forensics, binary exploitation… For which I lost the course material :(