About Me

I am an Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside. I earned by Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. I was fortunate to be supervised by professor Wenke Lee and Taesoo Kim.

My research interests include system security, deep learning, program analysis and verification, and operating systems. My current research focuses on vulnerability related topics, including

• Advancing techniques for finding vulnerabilities.
• Eliminating vulnerabilities through automatic code transformation and verification.
• New exploit techniques and automated exploit generation.
• Runtime exploit prevention with software hardware co-design.

Honors and Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, 2021
• RAID'19 Best Paper, 2019
• WOOT'18 Best Paper, 2018
• DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge finalist (team Disekt), 2016
• Internet Defense Prize by Facebook and USENIX ($100,000 award), 2015
• CSAW Best Applied Research Paper, 2015

Selected Publications (full list)

• Automated Test Generation
  • SymSan: Time and Space Efficient Concolic Execution via Dynamic Data-Flow Analysis, USENIX Security 2022.
  • Jigsaw: Efficient and Scalable Path Constraints Fuzzing, Oakland 2022.
  • Reinforcement Learning-based Hierarchical Seed Scheduling for Greybox Fuzzing, NDSS 2021.
  • CrFuzz: Fuzzing Multi-purpose Programs through Input Validation, FSE 2020.
• Static Bug Detection
  • LinKRID: Vetting Imbalance Reference Counting in Linux kernel with Symbolic Execution, USENIX Security 2022.
  • Progressive Scrutiny: Incremental Detection of UBI bugs in the Linux Kernel, NDSS 2022.
  • UBITect: A Precise and Scalable Method to Detect Use-Before-Initialization bugs in Linux Kernel, FSE 2020.
  • IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems, CoNext'18.
• Automated Vulnerability Elimination
  • Don't Waste My Efforts: Pruning Redundant Sanitizer Checks of Developer-Implemented Type Checks, USENIX Security 2024.
  • UniSan: Proactive Kernel Memory Initialization to Eliminate Data Leakages, CCS 2016.
  • Type Casting Verification: Stopping an Emerging Attack Vector, USENIX Security 2015.
  • Preventing Use-after-free with Dangling Pointers Nullification, NDSS 2015.
• New Attacks
  • K-LEAK: Towards Automating the Generation of Multi-Step Infoleak Exploits against the Linux Kernel, NDSS 2024.
  • Zero-Query Transfer Attacks on Context-Aware Object Detectors, CVPR 2022.
  • Context-Aware Transfer Attacks for Object Detection, AAAI 2022.
  • Adversarial Attacks on Black Box Video Classifiers: Leveraging the Power of Geometric Transformations, NeurIPS 2021.
• Attack Mitigation
  • PeTAL: Ensuring Access Control Integrity against Data-only Attacks on Linux, CCS 2024.
  • Exploiting Multi-Object Relationships for Detecting Adversarial Attacks in Complex Scenes, ICCV 2021.
  • Connecting the Dots: Detecting Adversarial Perturbations Using Context Inconsistency, ECCV 2020.
  • SPECCFI: Mitigating Spectre Attacks using CFI Informed Speculation, Oakland 2020.

Teaching

• CS153 Design of Operating Systems: 23F 23S 21F
• CS255 Computer Security: 24F 23F 22F
• CS250 Software Security: 21S

Current Lab Members

• Haochen Zeng, PhD student
• Mingjun Yin, PhD student
• Zhengchuan Liang, PhD student (co-advised with Zhiyun)
• Trishna Chakraborty, PhD student (co-advised with Amit)
• Ali Rezayi Nejad, PhD student (co-advised with Manu)
• Zhaorui Li, PhD student
• Jiajun Cheng, PhD student (co-advised with Hung-Wei)

Alumni

• Yizhuo Zhai, PhD, 2024, Post-doc Georgia Tech
• Jinghan Wang, PhD, 2022
• Ju Chen, PhD, 2022, DeepBits
• Ali Nowraiz Khan, MS, 2022
• Shasha Li, PhD, 2021, Amazon
• Mingyi Huang, MS, 2021, Cisco
• Md Lutfor Rahman, PhD, 2020, CSU San Marcos
• Muhammad Faizan Ul Ghani, MS, 2020, Synopsys
• Dang Tu Nguyen, MS, 2018, Qualcomm

Professional Services

Technical Program Committees

• ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS): 2017, 2018, 2019
• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022, 2024
• USENIX Security (SEC): 2021, 2022, 2025
• ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS): 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022