Cyber-security, the journey from Formal Methods, Program Analysis to Data Analytics

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Cybersecurity Lab Seminar Series
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Speaker:        Dr. LIU Yang
                Nanyang Technological University

Title:          "Cyber-security, the journey from Formal Methods, Program
                 Analysis to Data Analytics"

Date:           Monday, 19 September 2016

Time:           12 noon to 1:00pm

Venue:          Room 3501 (via lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Cyber-security is a complex system research, which requires the knowledge
and understanding cross all layers of the computer architecture. In this
work, I would like to share our attempts to solve security problems using
various techniques. Starting from formal methods, we have applied formal
modeling and reasoning to security designs and implementations on the
topics related to security protocols, virtualization systems and Android
apps. These efforts lead to our recent research project "Securify A
Compositional Approach of Building Security Verified System", which aims
at building secure and verifiable systems ground-up. Security verification
and building attack-free systems are very
challenging tasks in view of the size and the complexity of the systems.
To solve the scalability problem, we start to explore various program
analysis to enhance the state-of-the-art malware and vulnerability
detection, which generates encouraging results in Javascript/Android
malware and binary vulnerabilities hunting. Along the way, we have
collected size malware/vulnerabilities samples, which are currently used
to improving security analysis, understand the security trend, attack
attribution/correlation and eventually provide high-level intelligence.

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Biography:

Dr Liu Yang graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Computing (Honours) in
the National University of Singapore (NUS). In 2010, he obtained his PhD
and started his post doctoral work in NUS, MIT and SUTD. In 2011, Dr Liu
is awarded the Temasek Research Fellowship at NUS to be the Principal
Investigator in the area of Cyber Security. In 2012 fall, he joined
Nanyang Technological University as a Nanyang Assistant professor. He is
currently the director of the cybersecurity lab in NTU.

Dr. Liu specializes in software verification, security and software
engineering. His research has bridged the gap between the theory and
practical usage of formal methods and program analysis to evaluate the
design and implementation of software for high assurance and security. His
work led to the development of a state-of-the-art model checker, Process
Analysis Toolkit (PAT). This tool is used by research institutions in over
80 countries for research and education. By now, he has more than 150
publications in top tier conferences and journals and is leading a
research team of 30 researchers.