Research Interests

• An innate desire to protect the innocent from evil guided me to cybersecurity. 

• I'm generally interested in system security. My current research focuses on AI agent security, including the following topics:

  • Emergent vulnerabilities in agent systems.

  • Secure-by-design architecture. 

• In the past, I have worked on cyber-physical system security, malware analysis, and web security.

Note: I'm actively looking for interns in the industry on practical issues of agent systems. I'm also open to research collaboration on this topic. Please feel free to drop an email if you are interested.

Technical Reports

• Repurposing Agentic Orchestrator for Safety Evaluation of Tool Orchestration [pdf] 

Jizhou Chen, Samuel Lee Cong.

🏆2nd place in the safety track of LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon, UC Berkeley, 2024.

* This project is just a PoC appetizer. Currently cooking the main course.

Publications

• COINDEF: A Comprehensive Code Injection Defense for the Electron Framework [To appear]

Zheng Yang, Simon Chung, Jizhou Chen, Runze Zhang, Brendan Saltaformaggio, Wenke Lee

In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'25), San Francisco, CA, May 2025. 

Philosophical Reflection: Find a centralized "gate" that all the objects of interest must pass through and then perform checks there -- you can't miss any in principle.

• Optimal Classification-based Anomaly Detection with Neural Networks: Theory and Practice [pdf] 

Tian-Yi Zhou*, Matthew Lau*, Jizhou Chen, Wenke Lee, Xiaoming Huo

(Submitted)

• Towards Generic Database Management System Fuzzing [pdf] [video] [slides]

Yupeng Yang, Yongheng Chen, Rui Zhong, Jizhou Chen, and Wenke Lee. 

In Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'24), Philadelphia, PA, August 2024.

Philosophical Reflection: To solve a set of problems w/ variety:

Step 1:  Find a general (high-level) problem model that unifies the problem set (bottom-up).

Step 2: Find a solution to the general problem.

Step 3: Apply the general solution to each problem w/ tailoring as needed (top-down). 

• Reverse Engineering and Retrofitting Robotic Aerial Vehicle Control Firmware using DisPatch [pdf] [video]

Taegyu Kim, Aolin Ding, Sriharsha Etigowni, Pengfei Sun, Jizhou Chen, Luis Garcia, Saman Zonouz, Dongyan Xu, Dave (Jing) Tian

In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'22), Portland, OR, June 2022. 

Philosophical Reflection: Generalization comes with both benefits and risks -- unexpected attack surfaces can be introduced in the generalized part.

• PASAN: Detecting Peripheral Access Concurrency Bugs within Bare-metal Embedded Applications [pdf] [video] [slides]

Taegyu Kim, Vireshwar Kumar, Junghwan Rhee, Jizhou Chen, Kyungtae Kim, Chunghwan Kim, Dongyan Xu, and Dave (Jing) Tian.

In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'21), Vancouver, BC, August 2021.

Philosophical Reflection: A safety guarantee achieved at the low level does not necessarily suggest the same guarantee at higher levels.

* Philosophical Reflection is not a summary of the work, but a simplified (to be generalizable) philosophical takeaway I abstract from part of the work from my perspective, which does not necessarily (and unlikely) show the full merit of the work.

Service

Professional

• Sub-reviewer

  • ASIACCS '22

  • NDSS '25

  • USENIX Security '25

Organizational

• Co-founder & VP, Competitive Programmers Union (CPU)*, Purdue University (Spring 2019)

• Treasurer, Competitive Programmers Union (CPU), Purdue University (Fall 2019, Spring 2020)

  * Purdue's first organization dedicated to the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, CS 6035: Introduction to Information Security, Georgia Institute of Technology (Spring 2025)

• Teaching Assistant, CS 6262: Network Security, Georgia Institute of Technology (Fall 2022)

• Teaching Assistant, CS 390CP: Competitive Programming, Purdue University (Spring 2019)

• Teaching Assistant, CS 390CP: Competitive Programming, Purdue University (Fall 2018)

• Teaching Assistant, CS 159: C Programming, Purdue University (Spring 2018)

Selected Awards and Honors

• The 2nd Place in the Safety Track of the LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon (~3K Participants), UC Berkeley (2024)

• Qualcomm Scholarship, Qualcomm (2020)

• Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) Scholarship, AITP Executive Board, Purdue University (2018, 2019)

• Polytechnic Scholarship, Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University (2018)

• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education, China (0.2% Nationwide) (2016)