I am a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at The Ohio State University (OSU), the director of Computer Security Laboratory (SecLab). I am also a faculty member at Institute for Cybersecurity and Digital Trust (ICDT), Center for Automotive Research (CAR), Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI), and NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence (AI-Edge).
I am the founding faculty advisor of Women in Cyber Security (WiCys) chapter at OSU, and I am also one of the faculty advisors of OSU Cybersecurity Club (OSUCyber)
I received my PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University.
I am broadly interested in most of the cybersecurity problems (e.g., vulnerability identification, authentication, authorization, introspection, deception, applied cryptography, and side channel analysis), with a key focus on advancing or using program analysis to solve the security problems.
More specifically, I have been working on developing new or using existing program analysis and reverse engineering techniques for vulnerability discovery with native binary code in the past decade, and recently also on byte code, script code, or even source code, covering the entire software stack from firmware to applications, from web and mobile to IoT. In addition to finding the vulnerabilities, I also work on hardening the software against various attacks, particularly on improving or using binary code rewriting, virtual machine introspection, and trusted execution environment (TEE) towards this goal. Sometimes, I also use program analysis as a tool for measurement studies in order to gain insights and understanding on the security problems of interest.
My research has been supported in part by federal agencies such as AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, NHTSA, NSA, NSF, and ONR, and industry such as Amazon, Cisco, Raytheon, and VMware.
I am a recipient of NSF CAREER Award and AFOSR YIP Award. I also received the Harrison Faculty Award for Excellence in Engineering Education from College of Engineering, and also the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award from Departement of Computer Science and Engineering at OSU.
[CCS'22] "When Good Becomes Evil: Tracking Bluetooth Low Energy Devices via Allowlist-based Side Channel and Its Countermeasure"
[USENIX-SEC'22] "Playing Without Paying: Detecting Vulnerable Payment Verification in Native Binaries of Mobile Games''
[S&P'22] "vSGX: Virtualizing SGX Enclaves on AMD SEV''
[NDSS'22] Multi-Certificate Attacks Against Proof-of-Elapsed-Time And Their Countermeasures
[CCS'21] "CROSSLINE: Breaking "Security-by-Crash" based Memory Isolation in AMD SEV''
[USENIX-SEC'21] "SelectiveTaint: Efficient Data Flow Tracking With Static Binary Rewriting''
[USENIX-SEC'21] "Towards Formal Verification of State Continuity for Enclave Programs''
[CCS'20] FirmXRay: Detecting Bluetooth Link Layer Vulnerabilities from Bare-Metal Firmware
[S&P'20] Automatic Uncovering of Hidden Behaviors From Input Validation in Mobile Apps
[USENIX-SEC'20] Plug-N-Pwned: Comprehensive Vulnerability Analysis of OBD-II Dongles as A New Over-the-Air Attack Surface (in Automotive IoT)
[USENIX-SEC'20] "FirmScope: Automatic Uncovering of Privilege-Escalation Vulnerabilities in Pre-Installed Apps in Android Firmware"
[USENIX-SEC'20] SAVIOR: Securing Autonomous Vehicles with Robust Physical Invariants
[USENIX-SEC'20] Breaking Secure Pairing of Bluetooth Low Energy Using Downgrade Attacks
[USENIX-SEC'20] TXSPECTOR: Uncovering Attacks in Ethereum from Transactions
[NDSS'20] Automated Cross-Platform Reverse Engineering of CAN Bus Commands From Mobile Apps
[CCS'19] "Automatic Fingerprinting of Vulnerable BLE IoT Devices with Static UUIDs From Mobile Apps''
[USENIX-SEC'19] "The Betrayal At Cloud City: An Empirical Analysis Of Cloud-Based Mobile Backends"
[S&P'19] "Why Does Your Data Leak? Uncovering the Data Leakage in Cloud From Mobile Apps"
[NDSS'18] "Superset Disassembly: Statically Rewriting x86 Binaries Without Heuristics"
[CCS'17] "AuthScope: Towards Automatic Discovery of Vulnerable Authorizations in Online Services''
[NDSS'16] "Automatic Forgery of Cryptographically Consistent Messages to Identify Security Vulnerabilities in Mobile Services" (or How to brute-force user's password when given a mobile app)
[NDSS'14] "SMV-Hunter: Large Scale, Automated Detection of SSL/TLS Man-in-the-Middle Vulnerabilities in Android Apps"
[CCS'12] "Binary Stirring: Self-randomizing Instruction Addresses of Legacy x86 Binary Code"
[S&P'12] "Space Traveling across VM: Automatically Bridging the Semantic Gap in Virtual Machine Introspection via Online Kernel Data Redirection"
12/10/2021, Towards Distributed and Virtualized Trusted Execution Environments [PDF], Keynote at 4th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in New Computing Environments (SPNCE'21)
08/19/2021, Software Security: Past, Present, and Future [PDF], Keynote at the 3rd International Workshop on Cyber Security and Data Privacy (CSDP'21).