Faculty

• Gary Tan

Postdoc Associate

Kaiming Huang (since Jan 2026)

The SOS lab is currently having the following talented PhD students

• Ashish Kumar (PhD student, since fall '19)
• Jialun Zhang (PhD student, since fall '21)
• Monika Santra (PhD student, since fall '22)
• Bokai Zhang (PhD student, since fall '24, coadvised with Syed Rafiul Hussain)
• Xiaotian Zhou (PhD student, since fall '25, coadvised with Syed Rafiul Hussain)
• Vishnu Dasu (PhD student, since fall '25)

PhD Alumni

• Yongzhe Huang (PhD student, graduated in July 2026, now researcher at Palo Alto Networks). Thesis: Towards Automatic Driver Isolation and Secure Compartmentalization Design.
• Michael Norris (PhD student, graduated in July 2025). Thesis: Prevention and Mitigation of Faults and Violations in Internet of Things Environments Through Predictive Modules and Flexible Fault Handling Schemes.
• Xiaodong Jia (PhD student, graduated in Dec 2024, first job: Meta). Thesis: "Nesting Structures in Mirrors: Formal Techniques for Parsing and Inferring Visibly Pushdown Grammars".
• Sun Hyoung Kim (PhD student, graduated in Oct 2023, first job: compiler engineer at Nvidia Inc.). Thesis: "Practical Binary Analysis with Block Memory Model".
• Dongrui Zeng (PhD student, graduated in Dec 2021, now researcher at Palo Alto Networks). Thesis: "Evaluating the Attack Surface of Control Flow Integrity".
• Robert Brotzman Smith (PhD student, graduated in May 2021, now researcher at Perspecta Labs). Thesis: "Detecting and Mitigating Cache-Based Side-Channels".
• Shen Liu (PhD student, graduated in May 2020, now compiler engineer at Nvidia Inc.). Thesis: "Quantitative Privilege Separation with Pointer Supports".
• Ben Niu (PhD student, graduated in Dec 2015, first job: Microsoft Research). Thesis: "Pratical Control-Flow Integrity"
• Siliang Li (PhD student, graduated in May 2014, now software engineer at BlackRock). Thesis: "Improving quality of software with foreign function interfaces using static analysis"
• Elizabeth Carter (PhD student, graduated in May 2014). Thesis: "An Intelligent Debugging Tutor For Novice Computer Science Students". Coadvised with Dr. Glenn Blank.

Postdoc Alumni

• Zhen Huang (Postdoc, 2018-2019, first job: Assistant Professor at DePaul University)
• Zhiyuan Wan (Postdoc, 2015; now working for Zhejiang University)
• Suman Saha (Postdoc, co-supervised with Greg Morrisett, 2013; now Associate Teaching Professor at Penn State)

MS Alumni

• Qing Gong (MS student, 2019); Thesis: Extending Parallel Datalog with Lattice.
• Anish Prasad Paranjpe (MS student, 2019); Thesis: Bohemia: a Validator For Parser Frameworks.
• Hao Li (MS student, 2018); Thesis: System Call Trace Based Probabilistic Program Modeling for Exploitation Detection.
• Ashley Huhman (MS student, 2018); Thesis: Binary-Level Type Inference Using Datalog.
• Sheng-Hsiu Lin (MS student, from fall '14 to May 2015); Thesis: Alias Analysis in LLVM.
• Joseph Siefers (MS student, now work at Goldman Sachs); Thesis: Robusta: Taming the native beast of the JVM.

Notable Undergraduate Alumni

• Matt Kilgore (Undergraduate research assistant, Summer 2013, winner of Honorable Mention of 2015 CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Award; now a PhD student at MIT)
• Jason Croft (Undergrad, winner of Honorable Mention of 2009 CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Award; now a PhD student at UIUC)

Recent Collaborators (last 5 years)

Anton Burtsev (U. of Utah) Berkay Celik (Purdue U.) Yongkai Fan (Communication University of China) Syed Rafiul Hussain (PSU) Trent Jaeger (PSU) Mahmut Kandemir (PSU) Shagufta Mehnaz (PSU) Patrick McDaniel (PSU) Greg Morrisett (Harvard) Paul Muntean (TU Munich)

Aviral Shrivastava (ASU) Anand Sivasubramaniam (Penn State) Mike Spear (Lehigh) Cong Sun (Xidian U.) Saeid Tizpaz-Niari (UT El Paso) Ashutosh Trivedi (U. of Colorado Boulder) Danfeng Yao (Virginia Tech) Dongrui Zeng (Palo Alto Networks) Danfeng Zhang (PSU)

Group Photos