I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute for Information Security and Privacy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I am advised by Prof. Wenke Lee and Prof. Brendan Saltaformaggio. My research interests are in systems and software security, spanning vulnerability discovery via combined program analysis and machine learning, root cause analysis and exploit prevention, and simulation of attacks targeting financial markets.

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Articles

Fuzzers Suck: New 0-Day Shows We Need To Do Better

Thu 18 June 2020

Security

Fuzz testing (more commonly known as "fuzzing") has become a predominate technique for bug hunting because it's easy to deploy and yields results. Academic security research is now flooded with papers on the topic — USENIX Security alone accepted 7 papers in the 2020 Fall submission cycle — many of which propose …

New CVE Published (CVE-2020-9549)

Mon 02 March 2020

Security

CVE-2020-9549 has been assigned for a vulnerability I found in Pdfresurrect. The details are available here. This issue is currently being patched.

New PoC Published to Exploit-DB (EDB-ID-47254)

Thu 15 August 2019

Security

I published a PoC for a new vulnerability in abc2mtex version 1.6.1. This was discovered while testing an analysis framework I'm developing with my peers at Georgia Tech. The vulnerability is due to an unsafe strcpy that allows an attacker to overwrite a return address and achieve arbitrary …

A Beginner's Guide to Hacking Video Game Save States (Fire Emblem 7 on the GBA)

Sat 22 June 2019

Misc

As a fun change of pace, I decided to write up a beginner's guide to hacking save states for video games. In this tutorial, we're going to take a look at Fire Emblem 7 for the Game Boy Advance (GBA). Specifically, we're going to hack the health bar of the …

MLSploit Extended Abstract to Appear in KDD 2019

Tue 11 June 2019

Security

My coauthors and I will be presenting an extended abstract in the 25th Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'19) in August. Below is a preview: Title: MLsploit: A Framework for Interactive Experimentation with Adversarial Machine Learning Research Authors: Nilaksh Das, Siwei Li, Chanil Jeon, Jinho Jung, Shang-Tse Chen …

Barnum Paper to Appear in Information Security Conference 2019 (ISC'19)

Sat 08 June 2019

Security

My coauthors and I will be presenting a paper in the 22nd Information Security Conference (ISC'19) in September. Below is a preview: Project Page Title: Barnum: Detecting Document Malware via Control Flow Anomalies in Hardware Traces. Authors: Carter Yagemann (Georgia Tech), Salmin Sultana (Intel Labs), Li Chen (Intel Labs), Wenke …

Extended Abstract to Appear in CVPR-19 Workshop on Explainable AI

Fri 26 April 2019

Security

My coauthors and I will be presenting an extended abstract in the workshop on Explainable AI at CVPR 2019 in June. Below is a preview: Title: To believe or not to believe: Validating explanation fidelity for dynamic malware analysis. Authors: Li Chen (Intel Labs), Carter Yagemann (Georgia Tech), Evan Downing …

H&R Block App Analytics for 2019

Fri 12 April 2019

Misc

Last year I wrote a blog post about using the analytics publicly released by the USA government to gleam some information about H&R Block's mobile apps. If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so because in this post I'm going to give an update for the 2019 tax …

Android Intent Firewall Documentation

Sat 06 April 2019

Security

Awhile ago I was notified that the documentation on Android's Intent Firewall that I wrote while I was a student at Syracuse University is no longer available. Surprisingly, despite how old the document is, I still get requests for it. Thus, I've taken the time to make a copy of …

Malware Has a Color

Thu 21 February 2019

Security

In an upcoming paper I plan to present some preliminary work in applying machine learning to program control flows to detect anomalies. Specifically, my coauthors and I demonstrate how to use this to analyze document malware with promising accuracy. In previous posts, I've detailed the threat malicious documents pose to …