About
My name is Zhiqiang Lin, a PhD student at Department of Computer Science, Purdue University. My academic advisor is Prof. Dongyan Xu. I also work closely with Prof. Xuxian Jiang, and Prof. Xiangyu Zhang. I am a member of Lab Friends. My main research interests are System and Network Security, in particular using the techniques and tools on program (binary) analysis and virtualizations, to find out the vulnerability in goodware, or to analyze the behavior of malware. Before coming to Purdue in Spring 2007, I received a Master degree of Computer Science from Nanjing University, China.
Research
In recent years, what I am really interested in is given an application binary, or even an operating system, can we tell exactly whether or not any vulnerability exists in? This is actually a hard issue (theoretically undecidable), but very useful for many applications. The techniques I am exploring include (1) static and/or dynamic binary analysis, (2) symbolic execution and constraint solving, (3) input grammar derivation for guided fuzzy (this is one of the motivations why we want to reverse engineer the protocol format), and (4) virtualization (for kernel vulnerabilities, or malicious code analysis).
Selected Publications (full list).
- Zhiqiang Lin, and Xiangyu Zhang. "Deriving Input Syntactic Structure From Execution". To appear in Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'08). Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 2008 (20.5%). [PDF][Bibtex]
- Zhiqiang Lin, Xiangyu Zhang, and Dongyan Xu. "Convicting Exploitable Software Vulnerabilities: An Efficient Input Provenance Based Approach". In Proceedings of the 38th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'08), Anchorage, Alaska, USA, June 2008 (23%). [Abstract][PDF][Bibtex][Slides]
- Zhiqiang Lin, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, and Xiangyu Zhang, "Automatic Protocol Format Reverse Engineering Through Context-Aware Monitored Execution". In Proceedings of the 15th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'08), San Diego, CA, February 2008 (17.8%). [Abstract][PDF] [Bibtex][Slides]
Resources
I occasionally collected some research and development related resources, which I benefited a lot. Here you go if you are interested in.
Miscellaneous
Professional Activities
- Program Committee: IAW 2007
- Reviewer: MALWARE 2008, CATARS 2008, ICAC 2007, ICDCS 2007, SRDS 2007, ICCCN 2006
Awards and Honors
- USENIX Security Symposium 2008 Student Grant, 2008
- IEEE/IFIP DSN 2008 Student Travel Grant, 2008
- USENIX Security Symposium 2007 Student Stipend Award, 2007
Summer Intern
- Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International. Working with Dr. Vinod Yegneswaran on Malicious Code Analysis. May 2008 - August 2008
Gallery
- One of my hobbies is photography, some of random photos will be put here.
Contact
Office: HAAS 274
Mail addr: 305 N. University Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2107
TEL: +1 765 494 7843
FAX: +1 765 494 0739
The best way to reach me: