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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

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
[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
[USENIX Security '23] On the Feasibility of Malware Unpacking via Hardware-assisted Loop Profiling
Binlin Cheng, Erika A Leal, Haotian Zhang, Jiang Ming
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