Profile
Professor Kaveh Razavi is Associate Professor of Systems Security in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. He leads the Computer Security Group and is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science. His research seeks to make modern computing systems reliable and secure by examining the full technology stack, from operating systems and software interfaces to processors, memory and hardware design.
Research journey
His academic journey began at Sharif University of Technology, where he completed a bachelor’s degree grounded in the theoretical foundations of computer engineering. In 2009, an ETH Excellence Scholarship enabled him to continue his studies at ETH Zurich. The practical, systems-oriented character of the master’s programme helped shape his approach to research: understand complex computing platforms by building, measuring and challenging real systems.
He earned his PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2015, working on improving the scalability of cloud infrastructures. During the doctorate, he completed two research internships at Microsoft Research, where he helped build software and hardware prototypes for rack-scale computers. This combination of large-scale systems engineering, operating-system knowledge and hardware experimentation became the foundation for his later work in systems and hardware security.
Research contribution and impact
At Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Professor Razavi helped establish the hardware-security direction within the VUSec group, first as a postdoctoral researcher and later as an assistant professor. His work exposed how apparently isolated layers of a computer system can interact in unexpected ways, producing practical vulnerabilities in commodity processors, memory and operating systems. This research includes influential investigations of RowHammer, microarchitectural leakage and hardware/software attack surfaces, alongside defence mechanisms designed for realistic deployment.
He later returned to ETH Zurich to lead the Computer Security Group, and in 2025 was promoted to Associate Professor of Systems Security. His programme combines vulnerability discovery with principled protection: researchers analyse real hardware, develop new experimental and formal methods, and build secure systems that remain robust across changing processor and memory technologies. His work has received an ERC Starting Grant, a Dutch Veni grant, the Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award, multiple distinguished and best-paper honours, and five Pwnie awards. He also received ETH’s Golden Owl for teaching in 2022.
Areas of expertise
- Systems security
- Hardware security
- Operating-system security
- DRAM and RowHammer
- Microarchitectural attacks
- Secure hardware design
In the network
With more than 70 scholarly publications and a Google Scholar h-index of 39, Professor Razavi has established an internationally influential record in computer systems and security. His work is distinguished by careful analysis of real hardware, practical demonstrations of previously hidden risks, and the translation of those discoveries into stronger defensive designs.
Bibliometric values change over time; figures verified September 2026 from Google Scholar.
