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Jiang Ming

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Tulane University

About Me

Tulane-SSE

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tulane University. I received my PhD from The Pennsylvania State University. My research interests span Software and Systems Security. I strive to ground my efforts in practical security problems with an eye towards developing effective solutions to address realistic threats caused by today’s emerging technologies.

I am always looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students who would like to carry on top-notch research on Software and Systems Security. Candidates are expected to have a solid background in compilers, operating systems, formal methods, and strong programming skills. Please contact me if you are interested.

Research Interests:

  • 💡Binary Code Analysis and Verification for Security Issues
  • 💡Hardware-Assisted Software Security Analysis
  • 💡Mobile Systems Security
  • 💡Language-based Security

Honors & Awards

  • Google Research Scholar Award, 2024
  • IEEE Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security Shortlist, 2023
  • Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant, 2023
  • 2nd Place in ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finalists (Faculty Advisor), 2022
  • Cisco Research Gift, 2021
  • ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, PLDI 2021
  • CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists, 2017

Featured Publications

May 2025 In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, May 12-14, 2025. (Acceptance rate 14.3%=106/739 (Cycle 1))

[S&P '25] Inspecting Virtual Machine Diversification Inside Virtualization Obfuscation

February 2025 In Proceedings of the 32nd Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, California, 24 February – 28 February, 2025.

[NDSS '25] Retrofitting XoM for Stripped Binaries without Embedded Data Relocation

⭐ NDSS Artifact Badges: Available, Functional

April 2024 In Proceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Santa Clara, CA, April 16–18, 2024. (Acceptance rate 18.6%=112/601)

[NSDI '24] Towards Intelligent Automobile Cockpit via A New Container Architecture

November 2023 In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 26-30, 2023. (Acceptance rate 19.1%=234/1222)

[CCS '23] PackGenome: Automatically Generating Robust YARA Rules for Accurate Malware Packer Detection

⭐ ACM Artifact Badges: Available, Functional

August 2023 In Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, August 09-11, 2023. (Acceptance rate 29.2%=422/1444)

[USENIX Security '23] On the Feasibility of Malware Unpacking via Hardware-assisted Loop Profiling

August 2022 In Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, USA, August 10-12, 2022. (Acceptance rate 17.2%=256/1492)

[USENIX Security '22] PolyCruise: A Cross-Language Dynamic Information Flow Analysis

⭐ USEINX Artifact Badges: Available & Functional

March 2022 In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, Feb 28-March 4, 2022. (Acceptance rate 20.1%=80/397)

[ASPLOS '22] One Size Does Not Fit All: Security Hardening of MIPS Embedded Systems via Static Binary Debloating for Shared Libraries

⭐ ACM Artifact Badges: Available, Functional, Reproduced

🥇 Champion of PLDI 2021 Student Research Competition (Graduate Track)

🥈 2022 ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finalists: Second Place

🏅 Shortlisted for IEEE Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security 2023

February 2022 In Proceedings of the 29th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, California, 27 February – 3 March, 2022. (Acceptance rate 16.2%=83/513)

[NDSS '22] Chosen-Instruction Attack Against Commercial Code Virtualization Obfuscators

November 2021 In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Conference, November 15-19, 2021. (Acceptance rate 22.3%=196/879)

[CCS '21] Towards Transparent and Stealthy Android OS Sandboxing via Customizable Container-Based Virtualization

August 2021 In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium, Virtual Event, August 11-13, 2021. (Acceptance rate 18.8%=248/1319)

[USENIX Security '21] MBA-Blast: Unveiling and Simplifying Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Obfuscation

⭐ USENIX Artifact Evaluation Passed

📰 Our work motiviates the new IDA-Pro plugin by Hex-Rays.

August 2021 In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium, Virtual Event, August 11-13, 2021. (Acceptance rate 18.8%=248/1319)

[USENIX Security '21] Obfuscation-Resilient Executable Payload Extraction From Packed Malware

June 2021 In Proceedings the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, Virtual Event, June 23-25, 2021. (Acceptance rate 27.2%=87/320)

[PLDI '21] Unleashing the Hidden Power of Compiler Optimization on Binary Code Difference: An Empirical Study

🏆 PLDI Distinguished Paper Award

📰 ACM SIGPLAN Blog: When Compiler Optimization Meets Binary Code Difference

June 2021 In Proceedings the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, Virtual Event, June 23-25, 2021. (Acceptance rate 27.2%=87/320)

[PLDI '21] Boosting SMT Solver Performance on Mixed-Bitwise-Arithmetic Expressions

⭐ ACM Artifact Badges: Available & Functional

📰 Our work motivates the new IDA-Pro plugin by Hex-Rays.

May 2021 In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering, Virtual Event, May 25-28, 2021. (Acceptance rate 22.4%=138/615)

[ICSE '21] App's Auto-Login Function Security Testing via Android OS-Level Virtualization

💥 Zero-day Vulnerability Discovered: CVE-2019-15843, VULBOX-2019-0221059, CNVD-2019-42028, CNVD-2019-42029, CNVD-2019-42030, CNVD-2019-42031, CNVD-2019-42032, CNVD-2019-42033, CNVD-2019-42034

November 2020 In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Event, November 9-13, 2020. (Acceptance rate 16.9%=121/715)

[CCS '20] PatchScope: Memory Object Centric Patch Diffing

November 2020 In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Event, November 9-13, 2020. (Acceptance rate 16.9%=121/715)

[CCS '20] VAHunt: Warding Off New Repackaged Android Malware in App-Virtualization's Clothing

June 2019 In Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, Seoul, South Korea, June 17-21, 2019. (Acceptance rate 22.7%=39/172)

[MobiSys '19] "Jekyll and Hyde" is Risky: Shared-Everything Threat Mitigation in Dual-Instance Apps

October 2018 In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Toronto, Canada, October 15-19, 2018. (Acceptance rate 16.6%=134/809)

[CCS '18] VMHunt: A Verifiable Approach to Partial-Virtualized Binary Code Simplification

October 2018 In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Toronto, Canada, October 15-19, 2018. (Acceptance rate 16.6%=134/809)

[CCS '18] Towards Paving the Way for Large-Scale Windows Malware Analysis: Generic Binary Unpacking with Orders-of-Magnitude Performance Boost

📰 UTA News Report

August 2018 In Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium, Baltimore, MD, USA, August 15-17, 2018. (Acceptance rate 19.1%=100/524)

[USENIX Security '18] Towards Predicting Efficient and Anonymous Tor Circuits

August 2017 In Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 16-18, 2017. (Acceptance rate 16.3%=85/522)

[USENIX Security '17] BinSim: Trace-based Semantic Binary Diffing via System Call Sliced Segment Equivalence Checking

May 2017 In Proceedings of the 38th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Jose, CA, May 22-24, 2017. (Acceptance rate 13.3%=60/450)

[S&P '17] Cryptographic Function Detection in Obfuscated Binaries via Bit-precise Symbolic Loop Mapping

🏆 CSAW 2017 Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists

September 2016 In Proceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Singapore, September 3-7, 2016. (Acceptance rate 19.1%=57/298)

[ASE '16] StraightTaint: Decoupled Offline Symbolic Taint Analysis

October 2015 In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Denver, Colorado, October 12-16, 2015. (Acceptance rate 19.3%=128/660)

[CCS '15] LOOP: Logic-Oriented Opaque Predicate Detection in Obfuscated Binary Code

August 2015 In Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D.C., August 12-14, 2015. (Acceptance rate 15.7%=67/426)

[USENIX Security '15] TaintPipe: Pipelined Symbolic Taint Analysis

November 2014 In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Hong Kong, China, November 16-22, 2014. (Acceptance rate 21.8%=61/280)

[FSE '14] Semantics-Based Obfuscation-Resilient Binary Code Similarity Comparison with Applications to Software Plagiarism Detection

⭐ Distinguished Paper Award Nomination

Recent Publications

[S&P '25] Inspecting Virtual Machine Diversification Inside Virtualization Obfuscation
Naiqian Zhang, Dongpeng Xu, Jiang Ming, Jun Xu, Qiaoyan Yu
[NDSS '25] Retrofitting XoM for Stripped Binaries without Embedded Data Relocation
Chenke Luo, Jiang Ming, Mengfei Xie, Guojun Peng, Jianming Fu
[NSDI '24] Towards Intelligent Automobile Cockpit via A New Container Architecture
Lin Jiang, Feiyu Zhang, Jiang Ming
[CCS '23] PackGenome: Automatically Generating Robust YARA Rules for Accurate Malware Packer Detection
Shijia Li, Jiang Ming, Pengda Qiu, Qiyuan Chen, Lanqing Liu, Huaifeng Bao, Qiang Wang, Chunfu Jia
[ESORICS '23] Intelligent Zigbee Protocol Fuzzing via Constraint-Field Dependency Inference
Mengfei Ren, Haotian Zhang, Xiaolei Ren, Jiang Ming, Yu Lei
See all publications

Teaching

I teach the following courses at Tulane University:

  • CMPS 4662/6662: Information Security
  • CMPS 3661/6661: Introduction to Software Security

Team

I'm fortunate to advise many talented students.

Current PhD Students:

  • Cristian C. Garces
  • Kun Liu
  • Keith Mitchell
  • Chenke Luo (visiting student from Wuhan University)

Current Master Thesis Students:

  • J. Liu

Alumni:

  • Dr. Haotian Zhang is on the academic job market!
  • Dr. Erika A. Leal (PhD ‘24), Assistant Professor, Baylor University
  • Dr. Xiaolei Ren (PhD ‘23, co-advised with Jeff Lei), Assistant Professor, Macau University of Science and Technology
  • Dr. Mengfei Ren (PhD ‘23, co-advised with Jeff Lei), Assistant Professor, The University of Alabama in Huntsville
  • Dr. Armon Barton (PhD ‘18, co-advised with Matthew Wright), Assistant Professor, Naval Postgraduate School.
  • Dr. Mohsin Junaid (PhD ‘17, co-advised with David Kung), Senior Engineer, Samsung Research America.
  • John Podolanko (M.Sc. ‘19), Cyber Security Manager, Tenet Healthcare.
  • Jay Mayank Patel (M.Sc. ‘19), Software Engineer, Amazon.
  • Anchal Raheja (M.Sc. ‘18), Information Security Engineer, Copart.
  • Ashwini Balkrushna Kardile (M.Sc. ‘18), Software Engineer, Intel.

Services

Technical Program Committee:

  • [USENIX Security]: USENIX Security Symposium, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025
  • [CCS]: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2019, 2020.
  • [ICICS]: International Conference on Information and Communications Security, 2019, 2020, 2021
  • [FEAST]: ACM CCS Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation, 2018, 2019, 2020.
  • Security and Communication Networks, Special Issue “Attack and Defence of Smart Systems”, Guest Editor.
  • Frontiers in Computer Science, Special Issue “Intelligent Defenses for Secure Mobile Software and Systems”, Guest Editor.

Versatility

Dec 5, 2022 2 min read

Photography

I enjoy taking pictures to remember a particular moment in my life. My favorite topics are landscape, nature, and the night sky.

Contact

  • jming[at]tulane[dot]edu
  • 303C Stanley Thomas Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118
  • Thursday 10:00 am to 11:50 am or email for appointment