Jana Hofmann

I’m a tenure-track faculty at Max-Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), where I lead the group for Formal Security Engineering. I am also a principle investigator at the CASA Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr University, Bochum. Previously, I was a researcher at Azure Research, Microsoft. I obtained my PhD from Saarland University while working at CISPA.

I develop techniques to establish strong security guarantees at the hardware-software interface, with a focus on information flow security. Much of my work addresses microarchitectural side channels, where I design methods to detect, formally specify, and ultimately prevent information leakage. My research combines techniques from formal methods, programming languages, and systems security research. I am working on both verification approaches for smaller, white-box hardware designs and model-based testing for larger-scale software and black-box hardware.

open positions

I am hiring! I welcome applications for PhD and postdoc positions. Write me an email if you are interested in systems security and/or formal methods! Please include your CV and your university transcripts. I also offer Bachelor’s and Master’s theses.

news

May 20, 2026	Our paper Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural Leaks was awarded a Distinguished Paper Award at S&P!
May 05, 2026	I’m very proud to announce that Clara Schneidewind’s and my course Functional Programming was nominated for the RUB Excellent Teaching Award!
Apr 13, 2026	Our paper A Deductive System for Contract Satisfaction Proofs will appear at PLDI’26. The preprint is available on ArXiv.
Feb 13, 2026	I am a Co-PC chair of FCS@CSF@FLoC’26, the workshop on Foundations of Computer Security. Consider submitting past or ongoing work (either short or long papers).

older news

recent publications

PLDI

A Deductive System for Contract Satisfaction Proofs

Arthur Correnson, Haoyi Zeng, and Jana Hofmann

2026

Accepted at PLDI’26

PDF

S&P

Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural Leaks

Oleksii Oleksenko, Flavien Solt, Cédric Fournet, Jana Hofmann, Boris Köpf, and 1 more author

2025

Accepted at S&P 2025, appeared at S&P 2026 due to embargo

Distinguished Paper Award DOI Bib PDF

Received distinguished paper award at S&P’26 (retroactively for S&P’25).

@article{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2507-06039,
  author = {Oleksenko, Oleksii and Solt, Flavien and Fournet, C{\'{e}}dric and Hofmann, Jana and K{\"{o}}pf, Boris and Volos, Stavros},
  title = {Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural
                    Leaks},
  volume = {abs/2507.06039},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06039},
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2507.06039},
  eprinttype = {arXiv},
  timestamp = {Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:29:32 +0200},
  biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/journals/corr/abs-2507-06039.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
  note = {Accepted at S\&P 2025, appeared at S\&P 2026 due to embargo},
}

CCS

Principled Microarchitectural Isolation on Cloud CPUs

Stavros Volos, Cédric Fournet, Jana Hofmann, Boris Köpf, and Oleksii Oleksenko

In ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2024

Distinguished Paper Award DOI Bib PDF

Received distinguished paper award at CCS’24.

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/ccs/VolosFHKO24,
  author = {Volos, Stavros and Fournet, C{\'{e}}dric and Hofmann, Jana and K{\"{o}}pf, Boris and Oleksenko, Oleksii},
  editor = {Luo, Bo and Liao, Xiaojing and Xu, Jun and Kirda, Engin and Lie, David},
  title = {Principled Microarchitectural Isolation on Cloud CPUs},
  booktitle = {{ACM} {SIGSAC} Conference on Computer and
                    Communications Security},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1145/3658644.3690183},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3658644.3690183},
}

more publications