My research interests include program analysis,
software error detection and analysis, computer systems, software
engineering, and compiler techniques.
Automatically Identifying Trigger-based Behavior in
Malware. [PDF]
David Brumley, Cody Hartwig, Zhenkai Liang, James Newsome,
Pongsin Poosankam, Dawn Song, and Heng Yin.
In Botnet Analysis and Defense, vol. 36 of Advances in
Information Security Series, Wenke Lee, Cliff Wang, and David
Dagon (editors), pp. 65-88, Springer, 2008.
HookFinder: Identifying and Understanding Malware
Hooking Behaviors. [PDF]
Heng Yin, Zhenkai Liang, and Dawn Song.
In the 15th Annual Network and Distributed System Security
Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, February 2008. (Acceptance
rate: 17.8%)
Polyglot: Automatic Extraction of Protocol Message
Format using Dynamic Binary Analysis. [PDF]
Juan Caballero, Heng Yin, Zhenkai Liang, and Dawn Dong.
In the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
Security (CCS), Alexandria, VA, October 2007. (Acceptance
rate: 18%)
Towards Automatic Discovery of Deviations in Binary
Implementations with Applications to Error Detection and
Fingerprint Generation. [PDF][Talk] (Best paper award)
David Brumley, Juan Caballero, Zhenkai Liang, James Newsome,
and Dawn Song. the 16th USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, August
2007. (Acceptance rate: 12.3%)
Automatic Generation of Buffer Overflow Attack
Signatures: An Approach Based on Program Behavior Models.
[PDF][Talk]
Zhenkai Liang and R. Sekar. 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
(ACSAC), Tucson, AZ, December 2005. (Acceptance rate:
19.6%)
Fast and Automated Generation of Attack Signatures: A
Basis for Building Self-Protecting Servers. [PDF][Talk]
Zhenkai Liang and R. Sekar. 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
(CCS), Alexandria, VA, November 2005. (Acceptance rate:
15.2%)
Automatic Synthesis of Filters to Discard Buffer
Overflow Attacks: A Step Towards Realizing Self-Healing
Systems. [PDF]
Zhenkai Liang, R. Sekar, and Daniel C. DuVarney. USENIX Annual Technical Conference (short paper),
Anaheim, CA, April 2005.
One-way Isolation: An Effective Approach for Realizing
Safe Execution Environments. [PDF]
Weiqing Sun, Zhenkai Liang, R.Sekar, and V.N.
Venkatakrishnan. 12th Annual Network and Distributed System Security
Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, February 2005. (Acceptance
rate: 13%)
Isolated Program Execution: An Application Transparent
Approach for Executing Untrusted Programs. [PDF][Talk] (Best paper award)
Zhenkai Liang, V.N. Venkatakrishnan, and R. Sekar. 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
(ACSAC), Las Vegas, NV, December 2003.
An approach for Secure Software Installation.
[PDF]
V.N. Venkatakrishnan, R. Sekar, S. Tsipa, T. Kamat, and Z.
Liang. 16th Large Installation System Administration Conference
(LISA), Philadelphia, PA, November 2002.
Here is my GnuPG public key signed by CACert.org (I'm
an assurer of CACert). Key ID: 0xB98FE3FADBC5E7A8 Fingerprint: 9515 1EE2 0B27 0954 D4F9 0EDC B98F E3FA DBC5
E7A8