Weiteng Chen, 5th-year PhD candidate from UCR

Weiteng Chen is a fifth-year PhD candidate from University of California, Riverside. So far he has published three papers in the top-tier security conferences as the lead author. His research focuses on OS security and vulnerability analysis. He is particularly interested in exploitability assessment and kernel fuzzing. In his first project, he discovered a timing side channel inherent in all generations of Wi-Fi technology, which could be leveraged to hijack users’ connections to web services, leading to cache poisoning attacks. His second project aimed to assess the severity of a Linux OOB write vulnerability by attempting to automatically generate a corresponding PoC that could achieve IP hijacking demonstrating the need for an immediate fix. In his last work, Weiteng designed and developed SyzGen capable of extracting both structures and constraints of syscall arguments, as well as dependencies between syscalls, which is complementary to the kernel fuzzing tool, Syzkaller, since it requires manual work to develop syscall specifications. By evaluating SyzGen against 25 macOS drivers, it has found 34 bugs, 5 of which have been assigned CVE to date. Besides, he won IRTF 2019 Applied Networking Research Prize and a $15,000 award at GeekPwn International Security Geek Contest 2017 Silicon Valley. He has also spoken at events including Linux Summer Summit 2021, CCS 2021, USENIX Security’20, IRTF Open Meeting 2019, and USENIX Security’18.

Publications

Xiaochen Zou, Guoren Li, Weiteng Chen, Hang Zhang, and Zhiyun Qian. “SyzScope: Revealing High-Risk Security Impacts of Fuzzer-Exposed Bugs.” In Proceedings of USENIX Security 2022.

Jian Liu, Lin Yi, Weiteng Chen, Chengyu Song, Zhiyun Qian, and Qiuping Yi. “LinKRID: Vetting Imbalance Reference Counting in Linux kernel with Symbolic Execution.” In Proceedings of USENIX Security 2022.

Yizhuo Zhai, Yu Hao, Zheng Zhang, Weiteng Chen, Guoren Li, Zhiyun Qian, Chengyu Song, Manu Sridharan, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Trent Jaeger, Paul Yu. “Progressive Scrutiny: Incremental Detection of UBI bugs in the Linux Kernel.” In Proceedings of the Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2022.

Chen, Weiteng, et al. “SyzGen: Automated Generation of Syscall Specification of Closed-Source macOS Drivers.” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2021.

Zhang H, Chen W, Hao Y, Li G, Zhai Y, Zou X, Qian Z. Statically Discovering High-Order Taint Style Vulnerabilities in OS Kernels. InProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2021 Nov 12 (pp. 811-824).

Chen, Weiteng, et al. “KOOBE: Towards Facilitating Exploit Generation of Kernel Out-Of-Bounds Write Vulnerabilities.” 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20). 2020.

Zhu S, Iqbal U, Wang Z, Qian Z, Shafiq Z, Chen W. Shadowblock: A lightweight and stealthy adblocking browser. InThe World Wide Web Conference 2019 May 13 (pp. 2483-2493).

Chen, Weiteng, and Zhiyun Qian. “Off-path TCP exploit: How wireless routers can jeopardize your secrets.” 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18). 2018.

Teaching

TA for CS165 - Computer Security (undergrad) [Winter 2021]