Gang (Gary) Tan, Penn State University, CSE

Gang (Gary) Tan (\gäng tan\) [Vita][Pdf Vita][Contact]

Professor, CSE, School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Co-hire of Institute for Computational and Data Science (ICDS)
Penn State University, University Park

Affiliated with Institute for Networking and Security Research (video about INSR)

Brief Bio Dr. Tan is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and also a co-hire at the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his B.E. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

His research interests are computer security, formal methods, and programming languages. He leads the Security of Software (SOS) Group, which is broadly interested in applying compiler, programming language, and formal method techniques to improving computer security.

He currently serves on the DARPA ISAT study group. He has also received multiple awards, including a James F. Will Career Development Professorship, an NSF CAREER Award, two Google Research Awards, a Distinguished Reviewer Award at 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, a Ruth and Joel Spira Excellence in Teaching Award at Penn State, and some best paper awards at academic conferences.

My research group has a postdoc opening: description

Research Group

The Security of Software Group

Research Projects

Past projects

Professional Responsibilities

Advisory committees: DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group (2020-2023); Steering committee of CPSIOTSec.
Program chairs/co-chairs: 2020 DARPA/ISAT workshop on Data-Oblivious Interdisciplinary Representation (DOPLR); LangSec 2021; LangSec 2020.
Conference organization: Workshop chair, CCS 2020; Poster co-chair, NDSS 2019 and 2020; web chair, CGO 2019.
Program committee members: Oakland 2022; Euro S&P 2021; NDSS 2021; Oakland 2021; CPSIOTSec 2021; EISA 2021; MILCOM 2021; CPSIOTSec 2020; SecDev 2020; Wisa 2020; Euro S&P 2020; NDSS 2020; WISA 2019; CloudCom 2019; Usenix Security 2018; Oakland 2018; WISA 2018; ECOOP 2018; SecDev 2018; Oakland 2017; CloudCom 2017; WISA 2017; ISC 2017; SecDev 2017; Feast 2017; LangSec 2017; CCS 2016; Oakland 2016; ACNS 2016; LangSec 2016; SECURWARE 2016; CCS 2015; APLAS 2015; ASIACCS 2015; CloudCom 2015; SECURWARE 2015; MCS 2015; CCS 2014; ASIACCS 2014; NDSS 2014; SECURWARE 2014; OOPSLA 2013; APLAS 2013; CPP 2013; SPIot 2012; Open 64; WWW 2011 (abuse, security and privacy track); SPIoT 2011; CHINACOM 2010, CHINACOM 2009 (network and information security symposium);
Editorial Board Member, International Journal on Cybersecurity
CPSS 2012: joint summer schools on cryptography and principles of software security

News

(8/2021) Papers (one on parsing based on visibly pushdown grammars, and another on detecting cache side channels caused by speculative execution) accepted to OOPSLA 2021.
(6/2021) We are glad to release an upgrade of our Program-Dependence Graph (PDG) construction module to LLVM 10.0.
(12/2020) Paper "Refining Indirect Call Targets at the Binary Level" accepted by NDSS 2021.
(7/2020) Joining DARPA's ISAT study group (news release).
(4/2020) Congratulations to Shen, who finished his PhD with thesis "Quantitative Privilege Separation with Pointer Supports".
(3/2020) VEE best paper award for paper "Lightweight Kernel Isolation with Virtualization and VM Functions"; in collaboration with Vikram Narayanan and Anton Burtsev (UC Irvine) and Trent Jaeger.
(10/2019) Keynote talk at IoT S&P workshop [slides].
(10/2019) We are glad to release an upgrade of our Program-Dependence Graph (PDG) construction module to LLVM 9.0.
(9/2019) Darpa project "Secure Handling of Isolated Executables without Leaking Data (SHIELD)" funded; subcontractor to Perspecta Labs.
(8/2019) Paper "Program-mandering: Quantitative Privilege Separation" accepted by 2019 ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS).
(8/2019) NSF project "Automated IoT Safety and Security Analysis and Synthesis" funded; with Patrick McDaniel.
(6/2019) Darpa project "SPARTA:the Secure Parser Toolkit for Assurance" funded; subcontractor to Galois Inc. [Penn State news release].
(5/2019) We are glad to release the source code of an LLVM 5.0 module for Program-Dependence Graph (PDG) construction.
(1/2019) Paper "Using Safety Properties to Generate Vulnerability Patches." accepted by 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland).
(11/2018) Paper "IoTGuard: Dynamic Enforcement of Security and Safety Policy in Commodity IoT." accepted by 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
(9/2018) Paper "CaSym: Cache Aware Symbolic Execution for Side Channel Detection and Mitigation." accepted by 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland).
(8/2018) NSF project "Threat-Aware Defense: Evaluating Threats for Continuous Improvement" funded; with Trent Jaeger and Matthias Payer.
(6/2018) Glad to receive a Ruth and Joel Spira Excellence in Teaching Award at Penn State.
(5/2018) Glad to receive a Distinguished Reviewer Award at 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
(5/2018) Invited talk at LangSec 2018 [slides].
(5/2018) Paper "Sensitive Information Tracking in Commodity IoT" Automated IoT Safety and Security Analysis" accepted by Usenix Security.
(4/2018) Paper "Soteria: Automated IoT Safety and Security Analysis" accepted by Usenix Annual Technical Conference.
(4/2018) PSU news article about my group's research.
(3/2018) Outstanding paper award for CODASPY paper "From Debugging-Information Based Binary-Level Type Inference to CFG Generation".
(10/2017) Darpa project "Automatic Generation of Anti-Specifications from Exploits for Scalable Program Hardening" funded; subcontractor to Virginia Tech.
(10/2017) Glad to announce a survey article on software-based isolation (SFI): Principles and Implementation Techniques of Software-Based Fault Isolation.
(9/2017) NSF/Intel project "CAPA: Lightweight abstract memory features" funded; in collaboration with Lehigh and Arizona State. [Penn State news release].
(8/2017) Paper "PtrSplit: Supporting General Pointers in Automatic Program Partitioning" accepted by CCS 2017.
(5/2017) ONR project on Semantics-Directed Binary Reverse Engineering and Transformation Validation funded. Thanks to ONR!
(10/2016) Congratulations to Ben, whose dissertation won ACM SIGSAC Dissertation Award Runner-Up.
(3/2016) Keynote talk at MASS 2016 about MCFI/RockJIT/PICFI; Title: "Protecting Dynamic Code by Modular Control-Flow Integrity" [slides].
Older news...

Teaching

CSE 597, Special Topics on Program Analysis, Spring 21
CMPSC 461, Programming Language Concepts, Spring 20, Spring 18, Spring 17
CMPSC 447, Software Security, Spring 19
CSE 597, Special Topics on Binary-Level Program Analysis, Spring 19
CSE 597, Special Topics on Theorem Proving and Static Analysis, Fall 16
CMPSC 443, Introduction to Computer and Network Security, Spring 16
CSE 262, Programming Languages, Fall 15, Fall 14, Spring 14, Fall 13, Spring 13, Fall 12, Spring 12, Fall 11, Fall 10
CSE 411, Advanced Programming Techniques, Fall 15, Fall 14, Fall 13
CSE 334/434, Software System Security, Fall 12, Fall 10, Fall 08
CSE 497, Advanced Programming Languages, Fall 11
CSE 216, Software Engineering, Spring 10, Spring 09
CSE 397/497, Programming Languages Design & Analysis Fall 09

Representative Publications (all publications by year or by topic)

Huang, K., Huang, Y., Payer, M., Qian, Z., Sampson, J., Tan, G., and Jaeger, T. (2022). The taming of the stack: Isolating stack data from memory errors. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
Jia, X., Kumar, A., and Tan, G. (2021). A derivative-based parser generator for visibly pushdown grammars. In ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). [paper]
Brotzman, R., Zhang, D., Kandemir, M., and Tan, G. (2021b). SpecSafe: Detecting cache side channels in a speculative world. In ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). [paper]
Zhang, Y., Liu, X., Sun, C., Zeng, D., Tan, G., Kan, X., and Ma, S. (2021). ReCFA: Resilient control-ﬂow attestation. In Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), To appear.
Kim, S. H., Sun, C., Zeng, D., and Tan, G. (2021). Reﬁning indirect call targets at the binary level. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). [paper]
Ahmed, M. S., Xiao, Y., Snow, K. Z., Tan, G., Monrose, F., and Yao, D. (2020). Methodologies for quantifying (re-)randomization security and timing under JIT-ROP. In 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 1803–1820. [paper]
Norris, M., Celik, Z. B., Venkatesh, P., Zhao, S., McDaniel, P. D., Sivasubramaniam, A., and Tan, G. (2020). IoTRepair: Systematically addressing device faults in commodity IoT. In 5th ACM/IEEE Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), pages 142–148. [paper]
Narayanan, V., Huang, Y., Tan, G., Jaeger, T., and Burtsev, A. (2020). Lightweight kernel isolation with virtualization and VM functions. 16th ACM International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), pages 157–171. Best paper award. [paper]
Liu, S., Zeng, D., Huang, Y., Capobianco, F., McCamant, S., Jaeger, T., and Tan, G. (2019). Program-mandering: Quantitative privilege separation. In 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 1023–1040. [paper]
Wang, Y.-P., Hu, X.-Q., Zou, Z.-X., Tan, W., and Tan, G. (2019). IVT: an eﬃcient method for sharing subtype polymorphic objects. In ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), pages 130:1–130:22. [paper]
Huang, Z., Lie, D., Tan, G., and Jaeger, T. (2019). Using safety properties to generate vulnerability patches. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). [paper]
Brotzman, R., Liu, S., Zhang, D., Tan, G., and Kandemir, M. (2019). CaSym: Cache aware symbolic execution for side channel detection and mitigation. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), pages 364–380. [paper]
Celik, Z. B., Tan, G., and McDaniel, P. (2019). IoTGuard: Dynamic enforcement of security and safety policy in commodity IoT. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). [paper]
Celik, Z. B., Babun, L., Sikder, A. K., Aksu, H., Tan, G., McDaniel, P., and Uluagac, A. S.(2018). Sensitive information tracking in commodity IoT. In 27th Usenix Security Symposium, pages 1687–1704. [paper]
Celik, Z. B., McDaniel, P., and Tan, G. (2018). Soteria: Automated IoT safety and security analysis. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), pages 147–158. [paper]
P. Muntean, M. Fischer, G. Tan, Z. Lin, J. Grossklags, and C. Eckert. tauCFI: Type-assisted control ﬂow integrity for x86-64 binaries. In International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), pages 423–444, 2018 [paper]
Zeng, D. and Tan, G. (2018). From debugging-information based binary-level type inference to CFG generation. In 8th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), pages 366–376. Outstanding paper award. [paper]
Tan, G. (2017). Principles and implementation techniques of software-based fault isolation. Foundations and Trends in Privacy and Security, 1(3), 137–198. [paper]. [slides]
Liu, S., Tan, G., and Jaeger, T. (2017). PtrSplit: Supporting general pointers in automatic program partitioning. In 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 2359–2371. [paper]
Tan, G. and Jaeger, T. (2017). CFG construction soundness in control-ﬂow integrity. In ACM SIGSAC Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS), pages 3–13. [paper]
Tian, K., Tan, G., Yao, D., and Ryder, B. (2017). ReDroid: Prioritizing data ﬂows and sinks for app security transformation. In ACM Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation (FEAST), pages 35–41. [paper]
Tan, G. and Morrisett, G. (2018). Bidirectional grammars for machine-code decoding and encoding. Journal of Automated Reasoning, 60(3), 257–277. [paper]
Tian, K., Yao, D., Rider, B., Tan, G., and Peng, G. (2017). Detection of repackaged Android malware with code-heterogeneity features. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. [paper]
Tan, G. and Morrisett, G. (2016). Bidirectional grammars for machine-code decoding and encoding. In 8th International Conference on Veriﬁed Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments (VSTTE), pages 73–89. [paper]
Guo, X., Shrivastava, A., Spear, M., and Tan, G. (2016). Languages must expose memory heterogeneity. In Second International Symposium on Memory Systems (MEMSYS), pages 251–256. [paper]
Tian, K., Yao, D., Ryder, B. G., and Tan, G. (2016). Analysis of code heterogeneity for high-precision classiﬁcation of repackaged malware. In Workshop on Mobile Security Technologies (MoST), pages 262–271. [paper]
Niu, B. and Tan, G. (2015). Per-input control-ﬂow integrity. In 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 914–926. [paper]. [webpage]
Niu, B. and Tan, G. (2014). RockJIT: Securing just-in-time compilation using modular control-ﬂow integrity. In 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 1317–1328. [paper]
Li, S. and Tan, G. (2014). Finding reference-counting errors in Python/C programs with aﬃne analysis. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). [paper]
Niu, B. and Tan, G. (2014a). Modular control-ﬂow integrity. In ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), pages 577–587. [paper]. [webpage]
Niu, B. and Tan, G. (2013b). Monitor integrity protection with space eﬃciency and separate compilation. In 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). [paper]
Zeng, B., Tan, G., and Erlingsson, Ú. (2013). Strato: A retargetable framework for low-level inlined-reference monitors. In 22nd Usenix Security Symposium, pages 369–382. [paper]
Morrisett, G., Tan, G., Tassarotti, J., Tristan, J.-B., and Gan, E. (2012). Rocksalt: Better, faster, stronger SFI for the x86. In ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), pages 395–404. [paper]. [webpage]
Zeng, B., Tan, G., and Morrisett, G. (2011). Combining control-ﬂow integrity and static analysis for eﬃcient and validated data sandboxing. In 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 29–40. [paper]
Tan, G. and Appel, A. (2006). A compositional logic for control ﬂow. In International Conference on Veriﬁcation, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI), pages 80–94. [paper]. [slides]
Ou, X., Tan, G., Mandelbaum, Y., and Walker, D. (2004). Dynamic typing with dependent types. In Proceedings of IFIP 3rd International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, pages 437–450. [paper]

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