Abstract: Cyber-security is a complex system research, which requires the knowledge across all layers
of the computer architecture. In this talk, 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 the view of the size
and the complexity of the systems. To solve the scalability problem, we start to explore various program
analysis techniques 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 sizable malware/vulnerabilities samples, which are further used to improving security analysis,
understand the security trend, attack attribution/correlation and eventually provide high-level intelligence.
Lastly, we will share some very recent works on security analysis for Artificial Intelligence and beyond.
Bio: Dr. Yang Liu 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 2012 fall, he joined Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as a Nanyang Assistant Professor. He is
currently an associate professor, Director of the cybersecurity lab in NTU, Program Director of HP-NTU
Corporate Lab and Deputy Director of the National Satellite of Excellence of Singapore.
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 programme analysis to evaluate the
design and implementation of software for high assurance and security. By now, he has more than 200
publication in top tier conferences and journals. He has received a number of prestigious awards including
MSRA Fellowship, TRF Fellowship, Nanyang Assistant Professor, Tan Chin Tuan Fellowship, and 8 best
paper awards in top of conferences like ASE, FSE and ICSE. Currently, he is leading a large research team working on the state-of-the-art software engineering and cybersecurity problems.
