Welcome!

I am a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I am supervised by Dr. Giovanni Vigna and Dr. Christopher Kruegel. My research focuses on the intersection of network security and Internet measurements, often incorporating concepts of web security as well. In general, my work aims to empirically study the Internet landscape within a security context. You can find an overview of my publications below or on Google Scholar.

Prior to UCSB, I obtained my Bachelor and Master degree from Delft University of Technology. You can find more info in my CV. I am originally from Belgium 🇧🇪.

I love chatting with people! Do not hesitate to contact me at stijn@ucsb.edu.

Publications

[5] Pletinckx, S., Kruegel, C, & Vigna, G (2025). A Large-Scale Measurement Study of the PROXY Protocol and its Security Implications. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’25). San Diego: Internet Society. [To Appear]

[4] Pletinckx, S., Nguyen, T., Fiebig, T., Kruegel, C, & Vigna, G (2023). Certifiably Vulnerable: Using Certificate Transparency Logs for Target Reconnaissance. IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P’23). Delft: IEEE. [pdf]

[3] Pletinckx, S., Borgolte, K., & Fiebig, T. (2021). Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Detecting Orphaned Web Pages at Internet-Scale. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’21). Seoul: ACM. [pdf]

[2] Pletinckx, S., Habben Jansen, G., Brussen, A., & van Wegberg, R. (2021). Cash for the Register? Capturing Rationales of Early COVID-19 Domain Registrations at Internet-scale. International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS’21). Valencia: IEEE. [pdf]

[1] Pletinckx, S., Trap, C., & Doerr, C. (2018). Malware Coordination using the Blockchain: An Analysis of the Cerber Ransomware. IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS’18). Beijing: IEEE. [pdf]