Papers
Security research, applied mathematics, and work on how people and coding models divide the labour between them.
SCSS 2026, Faculty of Applied Sciences, POLITEHNICA Bucharest
presented, SCSS 2026Zero-Click, Old Tricks: anatomy of the 2025 WhatsApp/ImageIO exploit chain
Stefan-Daniel Wagner, D. Oltean, V. Matveev
How a zero-click chain reached remote code execution through an image parser, taken apart stage by stage: the delivery path, the memory-corruption primitive, and what made an old class of bug work again in 2025.
SCSS 2026 - first place among the master's presentations
presented, SCSS 2026Face recognition with PCA whitening and an RBF-kernel SVM: the mathematics, end to end
Stefan-Daniel Wagner
The eigenfaces pipeline derived rather than assembled: covariance and diagonalization, PCA whitening, the kernel trick, and a reproducible implementation on the LFW benchmark.
The same line of work at a second venue: the ICCP manuscript is the completed reproduction and ablation study. Whitening, Not the Classifier: Revisiting the Eigenfaces-SVM Pipeline on Labeled Faces in the Wild
Analysis + implementation, all 15 tests; also an SCSS 2026 item
publishedThe spectral (DFT) test, analyzed in depth - NIST SP 800-22 in C++
Stefan-Daniel Wagner
All 15 NIST SP 800-22 randomness tests implemented from scratch in C++17, the spectral (DFT) test taken apart in depth, and a documented error in NIST's own published worked example.
ICCP 2026
submitted, ICCP 2026A Disciplined Framework for Human-in-the-Loop LLM Coding Agents
Stefan-Daniel Wagner, Eduard-Cristian Popovici, Laurentiu Boicescu, Traian-Cristian Ureche
A framework for keeping a human in control of an LLM coding agent: where the review gates belong, what the agent is allowed to decide, and how the discipline holds up in practice.
ICCP 2026
submitted, ICCP 2026Hypothesis, Not Syntax: The Human-AI Boundary in Linux Kernel Vulnerability Discovery
Stefan-Daniel Wagner, Eduard-Cristian Popovici, Laurentiu Boicescu, Traian-Cristian Ureche
Where the boundary falls between the human and the model in vulnerability discovery: which steps are hypothesis formation and which are syntax, studied on published Linux kernel CVE material.
ICCP 2026
submitted, ICCP 2026The Zero-Line Graduate: How Subsidized AI and Artifact-Based Grading Manufacture Dependency Without Capability
Stefan-Daniel Wagner, Eduard-Cristian Popovici
What happens to a computing degree when the tools are free and the grade is attached to the artifact: a graduate who has shipped a great deal and written none of it.
ICCP 2026
submitted, ICCP 2026Whitening, Not the Classifier: Revisiting the Eigenfaces-SVM Pipeline on Labeled Faces in the Wild
Stefan-Daniel Wagner, Eduard-Cristian Popovici
A full reproduction and ablation study of the eigenfaces-SVM pipeline: which stage actually carries the result, and which knobs measure as noise on this benchmark.
The same line of work at an earlier venue: the SCSS 2026 referat is the presented mathematical write-up. Face recognition with PCA whitening and an RBF-kernel SVM: the mathematics, end to end