#security Articles


CheatFighter to Appear in RAID'23

My coauthors and I will be presenting the paper "Extracting Threat Intelligence From Cheat Binaries For Anti-Cheating" at RAID 2023 in October. Below is a preview of the abstract: Rampant cheating remains a serious concern for game developers who fear losing loyal customers and revenue. While numerous anti-cheating techniques have …

VulChecker Accepted to USENIX 2023

My coauthors and I will be presenting our work on detecting bugs in source code using machine learning at USENIX Security 2023. Below is a preview of the abstract: In software development, it is critical to detect vulnerabilities in a project as early as possible. Although, deep learning has shown …

PUMM Accepted to USENIX 2023

My coauthors and I will be presenting our work on preventing use-after-free and double free vulnerabilities at USENIX Security 2023. Below is a preview of the abstract: Critical software is written in memory unsafe languages that are vulnerable to use-after-free and double free bugs. This has led to proposals to …

Bunkerbuster to Appear in CCS'21

My coauthors and I will be presenting the paper, Automated Bug Hunting With Data-Driven Symbolic Root Cause Analysis, at CCS 2021. Below is a preview of the abstract: The increasing cost of successful cyberattacks has caused a mindset shift, whereby defenders now employ proactive defenses, namely software bug hunting, alongside …

MARSARA to Appear in CCS'21

My coauthors and I will be presenting a paper on "Validating the Integrity of Audit Logs Against Execution Repartitioning Attacks" at CCS 2021. Below is a preview of the abstract: Provenance-based causal analysis of audit logs has proven to be an invaluable method of investigating system intrusions. However, it also …

ARCUS System and Dataset Released

We have released the source code and evaluation dataset for "ARCUS: Symbolic Root Cause Analysis of Exploits in Production Systems," which will be appearing at USENIX Security 2021 in August, 2021. The paper will be ready for publication in about a month.


Three Kinds of Document Malware and Designing Frameworks to Detect Them

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with document malware and exploring techniques for detection. Malicious documents pose interesting challenges and have become the typical first vector for adversaries to achieve a foothold. Despite this, document malware seems largely overlooked by academics compared to their executable counterparts. In short …


Apple vs. the FBI

Originally written for the Syracuse University College of Engineering blog. In the wake of the tragic shooting in San Bernardino, many questions remain and people want answers. It seemed like a breakthrough in the investigation was imminent when the FBI got their hands on one of the shooters’ iPhone, only …