Building practical security guarantees for complex and evolving software and systems.

I am a Postdoc in Prof. Gang (Gary) Tan's group at Penn State CSE.

I earned my Ph.D. from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The Pennsylvania State University in Dec 2024 (Started Aug 2020). I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Trent Jaeger and Prof. Jack Sampson.

I also work closely with Prof. Mathias Payer at EPFL, Prof. Zhiyun Qian at UC Riverside, Prof. Danfeng Zhang at Duke University, Prof. Saeid Tizpaz-Niari at the University of Illinois Chicago, Prof. Bin Li at Penn State, Prof. Mahdi Imani at Northeastern University, Prof. Tian Lan at George Washington University, Dr. Derrick McKee and Dr. Hamed Okhravi at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

My research develops validation-driven security techniques for software and AI-enabled systems where complete end-to-end verification is often impractical. A central theme of my work is to use program analysis and verification to identify which behaviors, objects, or operating conditions can be trusted, and to focus stronger protection on the remaining security-critical state. This approach enables practical security guarantees without requiring every component of a complex system to be protected or verified in the same way.

I first developed this methodology for software memory safety, where my work determines when memory objects can be safely excluded from expensive protection and concentrates enforcement on the objects that remain vulnerable. I have since extended the same principle to broader systems-security problems and to AI-enabled systems, where assurance must account not only for program behavior but also for learned decision boundaries, uncertain inputs, and deployment variations. Across these settings, my goal is to determine what can be guaranteed, under what conditions, and how those guarantees can be enforced in practice.