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Yueqi Chen
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
College of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Colorado Boulder
Engineering Complex, ECCR 1B18
[ CV ] [ Email ] [ Twitter ]

Student Intern, Visting Scholar, and Ph.D. Student opportunities are available.
Please click here to view our prefered qualifications for applicants.
Feel free to email me if you are interested.

I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder. I obtained my Ph.D. from the College of Information Sciences & Technology at the Pennsylvania State University in 2022.06, under the supervision of Dr. Xinyu Xing and Dr. Peng Liu. I spent the last half year of Ph.D study (2022.01 - 2022.06) as a visiting scholar in Computer Science at Northwestern University. Before this, I received my B.Sc in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 2017.05. I was awarded the 2020-2022 IBM Ph.D Fellowship (1/24 globally).

In general, my research area is system and software security. I focus on revolutionizing exploitation techniques, formalizing weird machine, and using outcomes of these research to design protections in a quantitative approach for infrastructure cyber-systems (e.g., Operating Systems, Cryptography Libraries, and Satellite Systems). I am very happy that our works have received wide recognition in both academia and industry.

I am the faculty advisor of Boulder's Cyber Club .

News

[ 2023-03-10 ] HotBPF++ is accepted to Linux Security Summit North America, congrats to Zicheng!
[ 2023-02-17 ] I will serve as PC for RAID 2023
[ 2023-02-04 ] CLExtract is accepted to the 1st SpaceSec Workshop, congrats to Minghao!
[ 2022-07-25 ] HotBPF is accepted to Linux Security Summit Europe 2022
[ 2022-06-07 ] I have successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation. Cheers!
[ 2022-05-19 ] I will serve as session chair for IEEE S&P 2022
[ 2022-05-19 ] We, the TUTELARY team at NU, rooted newest Ubuntu at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2022 [ Press ]
[ 2022-04-08 ] I will join CU Bolder, CS department as Tenure Track Assistant Professor this August

To Future Students

  • Strong hands-on skills are highly valued in the team. Applicants with one of the following backgrounds are very welcome:
    (1) High-level CTF player in pwn and reverse engineering
    (2) Rich industry experience in system and security
    (3) Exceptional academic performance in computer system related courses
  • We encourage interdiscipline research and welcome applicants with expertise in Renewable Energy, Aerospace & Satellites, Quantum Computing, and other compelling fields.

Talks

  • Towards Exploitability Assessment for Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities
    Nov 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
    Nov 2019, Oxford, UK, University of Oxford [ Flyer ]
    [ Slides ] [ V2 in IBM S&P Seminar ]

  • Vulnerability Exploitabity Assessment and Mitigation Design Defects in Linux Kernel
    Oct 2019, Hangzhou, China, CLK 2019 (中国Linux内核开发者大会)

Teaching

  • At CU Boulder
    CSCI 7000-002 / ECEN-5033-002 Modern Offsense and Defense in Cybersecurity, 2023 Spring
    CSCI 7000-007 Advanced System Security, Instructor, 2022 Fall
    [ Schedule ] [ Wrap-up: Research Contributions in System Security ]

  • At Penn State
    CYBER 362 Cyber Analysis Studio, Teaching Assistant, 2019 Fall
    IST 456 Information Security Management, Teaching Assistant, 2019 Spring
    SRA 221 Overview of Information Security, Teaching Assistant, 2018 Fall

Publications

  1. CLExtract: Recovering Highly Corrupted DVB/GSE Satellite Stream with Contrastive Learning
    Minghao Lin, Minghao Cheng, Dongsheng Luo, Yueqi Chen
    Workshop on the Security of Space and Satellite Systems (SpaceSec) 2023

  2. Playing for K(H)eaps: Understanding and Improving Linux Kernel Exploit Reliability
    Yueqi Chen*, Kyle Zeng*, Haehyun Cho, Xinyu Xing, Adam Doupé, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Tiffany Bao
    USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2022
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]
    * indicates equal contribution

  3. An In-depth Analysis of Duplicated Linux Kernel Bug Reports

    Dongliang Mu, Yuhang Wu, Yueqi Chen, Zhenpeng Lin, Chensheng Yu, Xinyu Xing, Gang Wang
    Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2022
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]

  4. GREBE: Unveiling Exploitation Potential for Linux Kernel Bugs
    Zhenpeng Lin, Yueqi Chen, Dongliang Mu, Chengsheng Yu, Yuhang Wu, Xinyu Xing, Kang Li
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) 2022
    CSAW Applied Research Competition Top-10 Finalists 2022
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]

  5. (ELOISE) A Systematic Study of Elastic Objects in Kernel Exploitation
    Yueqi Chen, Zhenpeng Lin, Xinyu Xing
    ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2020
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code]

  6. (Symo3) Exposing Cache Timing Side-channel Leaks through Out-of-order Symbolic Execution
    Yueqi Chen*, Shengjian Guo*, Jiyong Yu, Meng Wu, Zhiqiang Zuo, Peng Li, Yueqiang Cheng
    The Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) 2020
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code]
    * indicates equal contribution

  7. SpecuSym: Speculative Symbolic Execution for Cache Timing Leak Detection
    Yueqi Chen*, Shengjian Guo*, Peng Li, Yueqiang Cheng, Huibo Wang, Meng Wu, Zhiqiang Zuo
    International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2020
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]
    * indicates equal contribution

  8. SLAKE: Facilitating Slab Manipulation for Exploiting Vulnerabilities in the Linux Kernel
    Yueqi Chen, Xinyu Xing
    ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2019
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ] [ Video ]

  9. Towards the Detection of Inconsistencies in Public Security Vulnerability Reports
    Ying Dong, Wenbo Guo, Yueqi Chen, Xinyu Xing, Yuqing Zhang, Gang Wang
    USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2019
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ] [ Video ]

  10. RENN: Efficient Reverse Execution with Neural-Network-assisted Alias Analysis
    Dongliang Mu, Wenbo Guo, Alejandro Cuevas, Yueqi Chen, Jinxuan Gai, Xinyu Xing, Bing Mao, Chengyu Song
    International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2019
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]

  11. KEPLER: Facilitating Control-flow Hijacking Primitive Evaluation for Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities
    Wei Wu, Yueqi Chen, Xinyu Xing, Wei Zou
    USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2019
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]

  12. FUZE: Towards Facilitating Exploit Generation for Kernel Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities
    Wei Wu, Yueqi Chen, Jun Xu, Xinyu Xing, Wei Zou, Xiaorui Gong
    USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2018
    [ Paper ] [ Slides ] [ Code ]

Other Publications

  1. HotBPF++: A More Powerful Memory Protection for the Linux Kernel
    Zicheng Wang, Yueqi Chen
    Linux Security Summit North America 2023

  2. HotBPF - An On-demand and On-the-fly Memory Protection for the Linux Kernel
    Yueqi Chen, Zhenpeng Lin
    Linux Security Summit Europe 2022

  3. A General Approach to Bypassing Many Kernel Protections and Its Mitigation
    Yueqi Chen, Zhenpeng Lin, Xinyu Xing
    BlackHat Asia 2021

  4. Your Trash Kernel Bug, My Precious 0-day
    Zhenpeng Lin, Yueqi Chen, Xinyu Xing, Kang Li
    BlackHat Europe 2021

  5. Finding Multiple Bug Effects for More Precise Exploitability Estimation
    Zhenpeng Lin, Yueqi Chen
    Linux Security Summit North America 2021

  6. Bypassing Many Kernel Protections Using Elastic Objects
    Yueqi Chen, Zhenpeng Lin, Xinyu Xing
    Linux Security Summit Europe 2020
    [ Slides ]

  7. Facilitate Linux Kernel Exploitation Step by Step
    Yueqi Chen
    BlueHat IL 2020
    [ Slides ]

  8. Hands Off and Putting SLAB/SLUB Feng Shui in a Blackbox
    Yueqi Chen, Xinyu Xing, Jimmy Su
    Black Hat Europe 2019
    [ Slides ] [ Video ] [ Demo1 ] [ Demo2 ]

Honors & Awards

  • The 7th place in DEFCON 29 CTF (Team Nu1L), Las Vegas, USA, Aug. 2021
  • Black Hat USA, Student Scholarship, 2021
  • IST Graduate Student Travel Grant Award, 2020
  • Black Hat USA, Student Scholarship, 2020
  • IBM PhD Fellowship Award, 2020 (1 out of 24 globally) [ Press 1 ] [ Press 2 ]
  • IST Graduate Student Travel Grant Award, 2019
  • The 28th USENIX Security Symposium, Student Travel Grant Award, 2019
  • FUZE is awarded one of the ten technical events of JD.COM (2018京东集团技术十件大事), 2018
  • The 16th place in DEFCON 26 CTF (Team r3kapig), Las Vegas, USA, Aug. 2018
  • Black Hat USA, Student Scholarship, 2018
  • The 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Student Travel Grant Award, 2018
  • The 5th place in NSA codebreaker Challenge, 2017

Community Services

  • Session Chair
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2022
  • Reviewer and Program Committee
    International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), 2023
    IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2023
    International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), 2022
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) Poster, 2022
    ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 2021
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) Shadow PC, 2021
  • External reviewer
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2023
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2022
    USENIX Security, 2021
    USENIX Security, 2020
    ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), 2020
    Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2020
    ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), 2019
    European Symposium on Research on Computer Security (ESORICS), 2019
    Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2019
    Information Security Conference (ISC), 2019
    ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communication Security (ASIACCS), 2018
    IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), 2019
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