I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. My research interests lie in finding new abstractions for future operating systems that address performance and security problems. I work with Professor Dongyan Xu in Lab FRIENDS.

Currently, I am doing my summer internship at NEC Labs in Princeton, New Jersey.

M.S. Prior to Purdue, I was a Master's student at the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where I was working as a research assistant in the Flux Research Group. My primary focus was on analyzing system intrusions using deterministic virtual machine replay and virtual machine introspection. John Regehr, and Eric Eide advised my research. I also collaborated often with Anton Burtsev, David Johnson, and Mike Hibler.

B.S. I did my undergraduate studies at Sun Moon University in Korea. I was very much into hacking, writing "beautiful" codes, and playing the classical guitar. My naive idea about obfuscating executable binaries against malicious reverse-engineering led me to obtain a Korean patent.

Stupid story about my first name

Many people think that Hwan is my middle name because of the space between Chung and Hwan, so they often call me Chung. Yet, the combination of the two syllables is my first name, pronounced as CHOONG-HWÄN. In fact, there is no concept of middle names in my cultural background. The space in my first name was mistakenly put by the office staff who processed my passport application.

I like designing and building novel system machanisms at the levels of operating systems, hypervisors, and binary, to solve problems in performance, security, debugging, and systems analysis.

Kernel Memory Access Guard. We guard operating systems from security threats using kernel data access patterns. We first generate attack profiles by analyzing accesses to kernel data, and then use the profiles to detect attacks that have the same or similar data access patterns while the system is running. To monitor accesses to kernel data efficiently and transparently, we designed a page-level access detection mechanism built on top of the KVM virtualization platform. This mechanism leverages the hardware-supported memory protection to mark the pages of interest as non-accessible, and detects the violations to the pages when the corresponding kernel objects are accessed in the guest virtual machine.

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