I am in the job market seeking a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position and also an industrial system security researcher position. Reach out to me via email!
About me#
[whoami] Hi, I am Qiang Liu, currently a postdoc at EPFL with Prof. Mathias Payer. I obtained my Ph.D. in cybersecurity at Zhejiang University (ZJU) in 2023, advised by Prof. Yajin Zhou. Prior to ZJU, I earned my bachelor's degree at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) in 2018. We have published a few papers at all four top-tier security conferences, IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, and ISOC NDSS. To engage the community, we always open-source our tools and evaluation scripts.
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[history] Cybersecurity remains an arms race where attackers are inherently at a disadvantage as they must protect against all vulnerabilities while an attacker only needs to successfully exploit one. Security therefore requires thinking outside of the box. My journey began with a Capture the Flag (CTF) cybersecurity competition, where I learned to break systems and software through techniques like reverse engineering and exploitation. Over the years, collaborating with my colleagues, we have developed novel and practical designs to protect systems and software from attacks. Notably, we have designed advanced fuzz testing techniques to unveil almost a hundred vulnerabilities in hypervisors before software is released.
[help] My research in cybersecurity aims at building a layered secure computing system, covering browsers, interpreters, network protocols, OS kernels, hypervisors, and trusted execution environment (TEE), which requires the research on the automatic vulnerability detection before the release of software and vulnerability mitigation at runtime. Ultimately, my research aims to make the computing system hard to break, benefiting not only individuals but also organizations.
[mail] We're open to discussing and collaborating on any of the following active projects. Feel free to reach out via this long-term email address: cyruscyliu@gmail.com.
Awards#
Project: Hypervisor Fuzzing#
- ViDeZZo, paper, IEEE SP'23, intra- and inter-message dependencies, libFuzzer, QEMU/VirtualBox, 28 new bugs
- ViDeZZo LLVM Project, forked from LLVM Project 13, instrumentation and libFuzzer for ViDeZZo
- buildroot-external-packages, PoC and exploit template
- HyperPill, paper, USENIX Security'24 (Best Paper), taking snapshot at VM-Exit, libFuzzer, QEMU, Hyper-V, and macOS Virtualization Framework, 26 new bugs
Project: Network Protocol Fuzzing#
- Development of Peach Pits for layer 3 network protocols. As an intern, I developed several Peach Pits by reading the specifications of specific network protocols.
- Tango, paper, ACM RAID'24 (Best Paper), abstract state feedback from edge coverage feedback, supporting targets in ProFuzzBench (except forked-daap).
Project: Firmware Rehosting#
- pyqemulog is the qemu-log ported to Python. It converts the structured trace generated by QEMU with -d to JSON.
- llbic, short for LLVM Linux
Build Issues Collection, compiles old Linux kernels in LLVM bitcode. It
replaces GCC to clang and adjusts cflags in the command lines to
generate bitcode files, and then links them all together to a
vmlinux.bc. - openwrt-build-docker supports automatically building the OpenWrt project given a target/subtarget of a specific OpenWrt revision from 10.03 to 19.07.1.
- FirmGuide (ASE'21) creates a QEMU virtual machine for a Linux-based embedded system, especially boosting the capability of dynamic analysis of the corresponding Linux kernel. In the emulator, you can debug, trace, and test the Linux kernel to collect runtime information to understand vulnerabilities, PoCs, root causes of crashes in the Linux kernel. FirmGuide is an effectively complementary to Firmadyne that focuses on user space programs - FirmGuide focuses on the Linux kernel.
- ECMO (CCS'21) takes a firmware image as input, and it can successfully rehost the Linux kernel inside the image to get the shell. Due to the variety of peripherals in embedded firmware images. It is rather hard to build a general emulator that supports all kinds of machines. The basic idea of ECMO is to transplant the peripherals by support ones into the target Linux kernel, hence solve the problem of peripheral variety.
Project: Android Authentication (Archived)#
This project evaluates existing and proposes new implicit continuous authentication approaches to serve as a second authentication factor longside fingerprint and facial identification. I joined this project as an intern and then proposed this project to be my final project for my Bachelor's degree. Relative research papers are RiskCog (TMC'20), ESPIALCOG (TMC'20), One Cycle Attack (TIFS'20), and TRAPCOG (TMC'23)).