LIANG Zhenkai Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science School of Computing National University of Singapore Mailing address: 13 Computing Drive Computing 1, #03-68 Singapore, 117417 Phone: (+65) 6516 1226 Email: Click to Reveal Office: COM1 #03-40

Research Interests

Teaching

• AY 2008/2009 Semester 1: CS3235 Introduction to Computer Security
• AY 2008/2009 Semester 2: CS6230 Topics in Information Security
• AY 2009/2010 Semester 1: CS5231 Cryptographic Techniques & Data Security
• AY 2009/2010 Semester 2: CS3235 Introduction to Computer Security
  

Publications

Book Chapters

1. 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.

Journals

1. Alcatraz: An Isolated Environment for Experimenting with Untrusted Software. [PDF]
   Zhenkai Liang, Weiqing Sun, R.Sekar, and V.N. Venkatakrishnan.
   In ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 12, Issue 3, January 2009. 

Conferences

1. Towards Generating High Coverage Vulnerability-Based Signatures with Protocol-Level Constraint-Guided Exploration. [PDF]
   Juan Caballero, Zhenkai Liang, Pongsin Poosankam, and Dawn Song.
   12th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID), Saint-Malo, France, September 2009.
   
2. DARWIN: An Approach for Debugging Evolving Programs. [PDF]
   (Distinguished paper award)
   Dawei Qi, Abhik Roychoudhury, Zhenkai Liang, Kapil Vaswani.
   ESEC and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), ESEC-FSE, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, August 2009. (Acceptance rate: 14.7%)
3. BitBlaze: A New Approach to Computer Security via Binary Analysis. [PDF] (*Invited keynote paper)
   Dawn Song, David Brumley, Heng Yin, Juan Caballero, Ivan Jager, Min Gyung Kang, Zhenkai Liang, James Newsome, Pongsin Poosankam, and Prateek Saxena.
   4th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS), Hyderabad, India, December 2008.
   
4. Expanding Malware Defense by Securing Software Installations. [PDF]
   Weiqing Sun, R. Sekar, Zhenkai Liang, and V.N. Venkatakrishnan.
   In Detection of Intrusions, Malware and Vulnerability Analysis (DIMVA), Paris, France, July 2008.
5. AGIS: Automatic Generation of Infection Signatures. [PDF]
   Zhuowei. Li, Xiaofeng. Wang, Zhenkai Liang and Mike. K. Reiter.
   38th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Anchorage, AK, June 2008. 
6. HookFinder: Identifying and Understanding Malware Hooking Behaviors. [PDF]
   Heng Yin, Zhenkai Liang, and Dawn Song.
   15th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, February 2008. (Acceptance rate: 17.8%)
7. Polyglot: Automatic Extraction of Protocol Message Format using Dynamic Binary Analysis. [PDF]
   Juan Caballero, Heng Yin, Zhenkai Liang, and Dawn Dong.
   14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Alexandria, VA, October 2007. (Acceptance rate: 18%)
8. Towards Automatic Discovery of Deviations in Binary Implementations with Applications to Error Detection and Fingerprint Generation. [PDF]
   (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%)
9. Automatic Generation of Buffer Overflow Attack Signatures: An Approach Based on Program Behavior Models. [PDF]
   Zhenkai Liang and R. Sekar.
   21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Tucson, AZ, December 2005. (Acceptance rate: 19.6%)
10. Fast and Automated Generation of Attack Signatures: A Basis for Building Self-Protecting Servers. [PDF]
    Zhenkai Liang and R. Sekar.
    12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Alexandria, VA, November 2005. (Acceptance rate: 15.2%)
11. 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.
12. 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%)
13. Isolated Program Execution: An Application Transparent Approach for Executing Untrusted Programs. [PDF]
    (Outstanding paper award)
    Zhenkai Liang, V.N. Venkatakrishnan, and R. Sekar.
    19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Las Vegas, NV, December 2003.
14. 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.

Links

• Selected Talks
• A collection of web pages that I found useful.

Contact Information