Dr. Dongdong SHE and Student Shuangjie YAO Awarded Distinguished Paper Award at the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Dongdong SHE, Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, along with his PhD student, Shuangjie YAO has been honored with the distinguished paper award at IEEE S&P'25 which is the top-tier cybersecurity conference. The awarded paper titled "Empc: Effective Path Prioritization for Symbolic Execution with Path Cover" It tackles a long-standing and fundamental challenge in the software engineering and cybersecurity domains: path explosion problem in symbolic execution. By introducing a principled path minimization technique using path cover (a classic concept in graph theory), Empc provides theoretical and practical advancement in this domain.

"Empc: Effective Path Prioritization for Symbolic Execution with Path Cover"

In the software engineering and cybersecurity domain, symbolic execution is an essential program analysis technique to reason program correctness and detect software bugs. A fundamental problem in symbolic execution is path explosion, i.e., a vast number of software execution paths to be checked. To tackle this huge number of path problem, we propose a novel solution to check only a minimal subset of paths instead of the entire set of paths with a simple concept in graph theory: path cover. Our technique can significantly improve the performance of symbolic execution in terms of code coverage and memory usage.

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Dr. SHE stated, "It's very exciting to receive the distinguished paper award from the premier cybersecurity conference IEEE S&P. It encourages us to keep exploring impactful cybersecurity problems from a theoretical and algorithmic perspective."

Congratulations to Dr. SHE and Mr. YAO on this remarkable accomplishment!

Dr. Dongdong SHE and student Shuangjie YAO honored with the Distinguished Paper Award at the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025.

Dr. Dongdong SHE