Welcome to My Academic Webpage!
I am a Postdoc at Dr. 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 May 2025. I am very fortunate to be advised by Dr. Trent Jaeger and Dr. Jack Sampson. I also work closely with Dr. Mathias Payer at EPFL, Dr. Zhiyun Qian at UC Riverside, Dr. Saeid Tizpaz-Niari at University of Illinois Chicago, Dr. Bin Li at Penn State, Dr. Mahdi Imani at Northeastern University, and Dr. Tian Lan at George Washington University.
Research Interests
My primary research focuses on building secure and trustworthy software and intelligent systems through program analysis, verification, and system-level defenses. My work spans software security, including memory safety, program hardening, static and dynamic analysis, vulnerability detection, reverse engineering, isolation, and defenses for speculative execution. More recently, I have extended these techniques to emerging AI-enabled and extended-reality (XR) systems, where I study the security and reliability of neural-network-driven applications through formal and probabilistic verification, runtime enforcement, and adversarial analysis. Across these areas, my research aims to identify and reason about security-critical behaviors, develop practical and efficient defenses, and provide rigorous guarantees for systems operating under increasingly complex software, hardware, and learning-based environments.
Publications
4 papers are in submission and currently under review.
DualGuard: Comprehensive and Efficient Memory Safety across Sequential and Speculative Execution
Sixuan Dang, Quan Zhou, Kaiming Huang, Jianan Zhu, Anitha Gollamudi, Trent Jaeger, Danfeng Zhang.
NDSS 2027
Believe It. Engage It.: A Mixed Reality Dataset of Engagement, Cognitive Load, Physical Load, Cybersickness, Task Performance Under Cognitive Attack [PDF]
Nasim Ahmed, Md Mahedi Hassan, Peng Wu, Kaiming Huang, Mingyu Zhu, JoAnn Archer, John Kwasinski, Peyton S. Bailey, Jessyca L. Derby, Tian Lan, Bin Li, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani, Rifatul Islam.
ISMAR 2026
One Size Does Not Fit All: Personalized Cybersickness Forecasting with Asymmetric Few-Shot Meta-Learning [PDF]
Nasim Ahmed, Peng Wu, Kaiming Huang, Tian Lan, Bin Li, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani, Rifatul Islam.
ISMAR 2026
Not Everyone Gets Sick the Same Way: Personalized Cybersickness Prediction via Bayesian Networks with Individual Susceptibility Modeling [PDF]
Nasim Ahmed, Peng Wu, Kaiming Huang, Bin Li, Tian Lan, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani, Rifatul Islam.
ISMAR 2026 / TVCG
Robust Engagement Estimation in Mixed Reality Under Cognitive Attack [PDF]
Peng Wu, Kaiming Huang, Mingyu Zhu, Zifan Zhou, Jianan Jiang, Nasim Ahmed, Md Mahedi Hassan, Shu Hong, Bin Li, Rifatul Islam, Tian Lan, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani.
ISMAR 2026 / TVCG
Lag You Can Feel: Within-Person Links Between Latency, Performance, and Trust in Mixed Reality
Peng Wu, Mingyu Zhu, Zifan Zhou, Jianan Jiang, Haowei Li, Juaren Steiger, Nasim Ahmed, Kaiming Huang, Gang Tan, Tian Lan, Rifatul Islam, Jonathan Dodge, Mahdi Imani.
XRSecurity 2026 (Co-located with MobiCom 2026)
LiteRSan: Lightweight Memory Safety Via Rust-specific Program Analysis and Selective Instrumentation [PDF]
Tianrou Xia, Kaiming Huang, Dongyeon Yu, Yuseok Jeon, Jie Zhou, Dinghao Wu, Taegyu Kim.
ArXiv (In submission)
Human Task Performance and Associated Internal States in Extended Reality: A Systematic Review of Cognitive, Psychophysiological, and Physiological Dimensions [PDF]
Nasim Ahmed, Peng Wu, Kaiming Huang, Sungchul Jung, Hansol Rheem, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani, Rifatul Islam.
Frontiers in Virtual Reality
Beyond Driver Isolation - Triaging Threats against Driver Isolation [PDF]
Yongzhe Huang, Kaiming Huang, Matthew Ennis, Vikram Narayanan, Anton Burtsev, Trent Jaeger, Gang Tan.
ACSAC 2025
Probabilistic Verification of Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Through Bayesian Networks [PDF]
Peng Wu, Nasim Ahmed, Abhiram Sarma, Kaiming Huang, Rifatul Islam, Bin Li, Tian Lan, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani.
IEEE ISMAR 2025
Validating Safety Guarantees of LSTM Models in MR Context [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Peng Wu, Mahdi Imani, Tian Lan, Gang Tan.
XRSecurity Workshop (Co-located with ACM MobiHoc 2025)
Personalized Bayesian Networks for Cybersickness Prediction in Virtual Reality [PDF]
Peng Wu, Nasim Ahmed, Kaiming Huang, Rifatul Islam, Tian Lan, Gang Tan, Mahdi Imani.
XRSecurity Workshop (Co-located with ACM MobiHoc 2025)
SoK: Challenges and Paths Toward Memory Safety for eBPF [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Mathias Payer, Zhiyun Qian, Jack Sampson, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger.
IEEE S&P 2025
SoK: Understanding the Attack Surface in Device Driver Isolation Frameworks [PDF]
Yongzhe Huang, Kaiming Huang, Matthew Ennis, Vikram Narayanan, Anton Burtsev, Trent Jaeger, Gang Tan.
Arxiv
Top of the Heap: Efficient Memory Error Protection of Safe Heap Objects [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Mathias Payer, Zhiyun Qian, Jack Sampson, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger.
ACM CCS 2024
OPTISAN: Using Multiple Spatial Error Defenses to Optimize Stack Memory Protection within a Budget [PDF]
Rahul George, Mingming Chen, Kaiming Huang, Zhiyun Qian, Thomas La Porta, Trent Jaeger.
USENIX Security 2024
Comprehensive Memory Safety Validation: An Alternative Approach to Memory Safety [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Mathias Payer, Zhiyun Qian, Jack Sampson, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger.
IEEE Security and Privacy Special Issue on Memory Safety
Assessing the Impact of Efficiently Protecting Ten Million Stack Objects from Memory Errors Comprehensively [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Jack Sampson, Trent Jaeger.
SecDev 2023
Evolving Operating System Kernels Towards Secure Kernel-Driver Interfaces [PDF]
Anton Burtsev, Vikram Narayanan, Yongzhe Huang, Kaiming Huang, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger.
HotOS 2023
KSplit: Automating Device Driver Isolation [PDF]
Yongzhe Huang, Vikram Narayanan, David Detweiler, Kaiming Huang, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger, Anton Burtsev.
OSDI 2022
The Taming of the Stack: Isolating Stack Data from Memory Errors [PDF]
Kaiming Huang, Yongzhe Huang, Mathias Payer, Zhiyun Qian, Jack Sampson, Gang Tan, Trent Jaeger.
NDSS 2022
Employing attack graphs for intrusion detection [PDF]
Frank Capobianco, Rahul George, Kaiming Huang, Trent Jaeger, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, Zhiyun Qian, Mathias Payer, Paul Yu.
NSPW 2019