Hugo Lefeuvre joins MPI-SP as Tenure-Track faculty

The newly established Dependable Operating Systems Group, led by Hugo Lefeuvre, investigates new ways to make computer systems more secure, safe and efficient. 

Hugo Lefeuvre joins MPI-SP as Tenure-Track faculty in November 2026. One of the topics Lefeuvre works on is compartmentalization: a practice used to secure a system by separating software into distinct “compartments” with restricted access to one another. Thus, when one compartment is compromised, the rest of the system is protected. Lefeuvre took this research further by systematizing existing practices, demonstrating new weaknesses, and contributing new defenses. For example, in recent work Lefeuvre and his colleagues raised awareness of the security vulnerabilities that arise when different compartments communicate with one another, finding numerous bugs in widely deployed server software. At the same time, his work on new defenses showed that both stronger and faster isolation practices are possible. He developed an innovative operating system, FlexOS, which allows application developers to specialize the operating system to their use-case by independently deciding which fine-grain software parts should be isolated from each other, which isolation model to use, and how components are allowed to share data, to obtain better security and performance than possible in traditional operating systems.

At MPI-SP, Lefeuvre will establish the Dependable Operating Systems research group. Together with his team, he will investigate new ways to make computer systems more dependable and safe by using techniques at the intersection of systems and computer security. As with all other research groups at MPI-SP, the team will not work in isolation. They will cooperate with experts from other disciplines to achieve this, using knowledge from formal methods, hardware architecture, and human-computer interaction. “I think that some of the most important problems towards making computer systems more dependable lie at the intersection between multiple aspects of computer science. The freedom MPI-SP offers and the diversity of my colleagues make it an ideal place for my group to explore creative solutions to these challenges," says Lefeuvre.

Hugo Lefeuvre received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 2024. He continued with his postdoctoral studies at the University of British Columbia. His work was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. Award for the best European Ph.D. thesis in computer systems, and an honorable mention for the SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.