Frank Piessens
KU Leuven professor whose DistriNet group has become one of Europe's most prolific sources of hardware and protocol attacks.
Piessens works where programming languages meet security, and his group is as interested in building protected environments as in breaking them. Sancus (2013) was a minimal TEE for small embedded processors, designed so the whole thing could be audited — the opposite of SGX's black box.
It is the attacks, though, that put Leuven on the map. Piessens co-authored Foreshadow, LVI and Plundervolt with Jo Van Bulck, and Mathy Vanhoef earned his doctorate in the same group before KRACK showed in 2017 that WPA2's four-way handshake could be fooled. A recurring theme: the specification was proven secure, but the proofs didn't cover what actually happened.