Hi there! I'm Charly.

I’m a PhD candidate at EPFL, Switzerland. My research focuses on building secure foundations for our compute infrastructure. I am part of the Data Center System Laboratory, advised by Prof. Edouard Bugnion. You can reach out by email using the address charly.castes@epfl.ch.

         

Highlighted Publications

  • The Design and Implementation of a Virtual Firmware Monitor
    SOSP'25
    Charly Castes, François Costa, Neelu S. Kalani, Timothy Roscoe, Nate Foster, Thomas Bourgeat, Edouard Bugnion
  • Sharing is leaking: blocking transient execution attacks with core-gapped confidential VMs
    ASPLOS'24 (presented at ASPLOS'25)
    Charly Castes, Andrew Baumann

Other Publications

  • Tyche: Composable Isolation as a Foundation to Manage Trust in the Cloud
    Euro S&P'26
    Charly Castes⁺, Adrien Ghosn⁺, Neelu S. Kalani, Yuchen Qian, Marios Kogias, Edouard Bugnion
  • On Attestation Dilution
    SysTEX'26
    Charly Castes
  • Lightweight Hypervisor Verification: Putting the Hardware Burger on a Diet
    HotOS'25
    Charly Castes, François Costa, Nate Foster, Thomas Bourgeat, Edouard Bugnion
  • Kicking the Firmware Out of the TCB with the Miralis Virtual Firmware Monitor
    KISV'24
    Charly Castes, Neelu S. Kalani, Sofia Saltovskaia, Noé Terrier, Abel Vexina Wilkinson, Edouard Bugnion
  • Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems
    PLOS'23
    Charly Castes, Adrien Ghosn
  • Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies
    HotOS'23
    Charly Castes⁺, Adrien Ghosn⁺, Neelu S. Kalani, Yuchen Qian, Marios Kogias, Mathias Payer, Edouard Bugnion
  • Attestable Software Versioning for Stateful Confidential Computing
    SysTEX'22
    Charly Castes, Edouard Bugnion
  • Decentralized In-Order Execution of Sequential Task-Based Code for Shared-Memory Architectures
    IPDPSW'22
    Charly Castes, Emmanuel Agullo, Olivier Aumage, Emmanuelle Saillard
  • Enclosure: language-based restriction of untrusted libraries
    ASPLOS'21
    Adrien Ghosn, Marios Kogias, Mathias Payer, James R. Larus, Edouard Bugnion
    Note: Implemented the Intel MPK backend as part of a semester project.

Recorded Talks

  • Everything Old is New Again: Virtualizing Firmware on RISC-V
    OSFC'24

Visiting

Service

Academic

  • JSys: Assistant Editor 2023 - ongoing
  • EuroSys 2023: Artifact Evaluation Committee
  • EuroSys 2022: Artifact Evaluation Committee

Other

Supervised Students

  • Ludovic Mermond
    • Fold, a Dynamic Linker framework written in Rust 2025
      Links:
  • Noé Terrier
    • Fold, a Dynamic Linker framework written in Rust 2025
      Links:
    • Virtualizing M-mode interrupts 2024
      Links:
    • Exploring Kernel Drivers in Rust 2023
      Links:
  • François Costa
    • Verification and deployment of Miralis 2024
      Links:
  • Frederic Khayat
    • Porting the Keystone security monitor to Miralis 2024
      Links:
  • Sofia Saltovskaia
    • Porting Miralis to the VisionFive 2 2024
      Links:
  • Abel Vexina Wilkinson
    • Firmware virtualization with Mirage 2024
      Links:
  • Maëlys Billon
    • A Communication Library for TEEs 2023
      Links:
    • Trusted Boot with Intel TXT 2022
      Links:
  • Filippo Costa
    • Verifying Rust Code with Serval 2022
      Links:
  • David Desboeufs
    • A Finite Interface Frame Allocator 2022
      Links:
  • Michael Paper
    • Verified Page Tables Manipulation 2022
      Links:

Teaching

I was TA for the following classes at EPFL:

  • Object Oriented Programming 2025
    Prof: Jean-Cédric Chappelier
  • Decentralized System Engineering 2024
    Profs: Bryan Ford, Pierluca Borsò-Tan
  • Software Enterprise: From Ideas to Products 2024
    Profs: George Candea, Edouard Bugnion, Pierluca Borsò-Tan
  • Decentralized System Engineering 2023
    Prof: Pierluca Borsò-Tan
  • Global Issues: Communication 2023
    Profs: James Larus, Anna Jobin
  • Projet Programmation Système 2022
    Profs: Jean-Cédric Chappelier, Edouard Bugnion
  • Foundation of Software 2021
    Prof: Martin Odersky