Zhichun "ZL" Li, PhD Research Staff Member Robust and Secure Systems group NEC Research Labs, Princeton Phone: 609-951-2650 Email: Mail:   4 Independence Way, Suite 200, Princeton, NJ 08540

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I am a senior researcher in the Robust and Secure Systems group at NEC Research Labs, Princeton, NJ since Aug. 2010. I received my PhD degree in Dec. 2009 from Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern University, I completed my B.S. in the Department of Physics and my M.S. in the Department of Computer Science & Technology both at the Tsinghua University in China. 

Now, I lead the security group at NEC Labs, which primarily focus on the Automated Security Intelligence project. Group members includes: Dr. Zhenyu Wu, Dr. Junghwan Rhee, Dr. Fengyuan Xu, Dr. Xusheng Xiao, Dr. Kangkook Jee and Dr. Mu Zhang. We are actively recruiting multiple new security researchers, please see the job post at CRA.

What's new

• We have intern positions for fighting APT with big-data oriented enterprise security for Spring/Summer 2015!
• Our SUPOR paper in USENIX Security 2015 has been selected as top 10 finalists for CSAW Best Paper Award
• Since 2012, to fight with APT, we have been working on a large-scale big-data oriented enterprise security project called Automated Security Intelligence
• Won Spot Recognization Award for the contribution on design and implementation of Dalysis (security vulnerability analysis for mobile apps) for development use in NEC and subsidiary companies.  
• Our CHEX paper has been presented at ACM CCS 2012
• Our research on social network spam analysis has been featured in Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and ACM Tech News.
• I spent the summer of 2008 studying performance bottleneck diagnosis of web services with Ming Zhang, Albert Greenberg and Yi-min Wang at Microsoft Research.
• I spent the summer of 2006 studying network situational awareness with Vern Paxson at ICSI/UC Berkeley.

Research interests

I have broad interests in security, networking and system related research. My recent research covers network security, smartphone security,  web security, cloud security, social network security, network measurement and distributed system diagnosis.

Selected Publications - (Click here for full publications)

• Bo Zong, Xusheng Xiao, Zhichun Li, Zhenyu Wu, Zhiyun Qian, Xifeng Yan, Ambuj K. Singh, and Guofei Jiang, "Behavior Query Discovery in System-Generated Temporal Graphs," VLDB 2016
• Jianjun Huang, Zhichun Li, Xusheng Xiao, Zhenyu Wu, Kangjie Lu, Xiangyu Zhang, Guofei Jiang, "SUPOR: Precise and Scalable Sensitive User Input Detection for Android Apps," Usenix Security 2015
• Kangjie Lu, Zhichun Li, Vasileios Kemerlis, Zhenyu Wu, Long Lu, Cong Zheng, Zhiyun Qian, Wenke Lee, Guofei Jiang, "Checking More and Alerting Less: Detecting Privacy Leakages via Enhanced Data-flow Analysis and Peer Voting," NDSS 2015


• Long Lu, Zhichun Li, Zhenyu Wu, Wenke Lee, and Guofei Jiang, "CHEX: Statically Vetting Android Apps for Component Hijacking Vulnerabilities," ACM CCS 2012


• Zhichun Li, Yi Tang, Yinzhi Cao, Vaibhav Rastogi, Yan Chen and Bin Liu, "WebShield: Enabling Various Web Defense Techniques without Client Side Modifications," NDSS 2011


• Hongyu Gao, Jun Hu, Christo Wilson, Zhichun Li, Yan Chen, and Ben Y. Zhao, "Detecting and Characterizing Social Spam Campaigns", ACM IMC 2010


• Zhichun Li, Gao Xia, Hongyu Gao, Yi Tang, Yan Chen, Bin Liu, Junchen Jiang and Yuezhou Lv,"NetShield: Matching with a Large Vulnerability Signature Ruleset for High Performance Network Defense," ACM SIGCOMM 2010


• Zhichun Li, Ming Zhang, Zhaosheng Zhu, Yan Chen, Albert Greenberg and Yi-Min Wang, "WebProphet: Automating Performance Prediction for Web Services," USENIX NSDI 2010


• Zhichun Li, Anup Goyal, Yan Chen and Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, "Measurement and Diagnosis of Misconfigured Peer-to-Peer Traffic," IEEE INFOCOM 2010


• Zhichun Li, Anup Goyal, Yan Chen and Vern Paxson,"Automating Analysis of Large-Scale Botnet Probing Events," ASIACCS 2009


• Zhichun Li, Lanjia Wang, Yan Chen and Judy Fu, "Network-based and Attack-resilient Length Signature Generation for Zero-day Polymorphic Worms," IEEE ICNP 2007


• Zhichun Li, Manan Sanghi, Yan Chen, Ming-Yang Kao and Brian Chavez, "Hamsa: Fast Signature Generation for Zero-day Polymorphic Worms with Provable Attack Resilience," IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2006 (Oakland 2006)


• Zhichun Li, Yan Chen and Aaron Beach, "Towards Scalable and Robust Distributed Intrusion Alert Fusion with Good Load Balancing," ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Large-Scale Attack Defense 2006


• Yan Gao, Zhichun Li and Yan Chen, "Reverse Hashing for High-speed Network Monitoring: Algorithms, Evaluation, and Applications," IEEE INFOCOM2006


• Robert Schweller, Zhichun Li, Yan Chen, Yan Gao, Ashish Gupta, Yin Zhang, Peter Dinda, Ming-Yang Kao and Gokhan Memik, "A DoS Resilient Flow-level Intrusion Detection Approach for High-speed Networks," ICDCS 2006

Software

• NetShield: a vulnerability-signature based Network-based Intrusion Detection System


• Hamsa polymorphic worm signature generator


• Reversible Sketch Code


• Linuxflow (include LPF and LFD)

Interns/Students

• Markus Kusano, Viginia Tech, Summer/2015, Summer/2014
• Bo Zong, UCSB, Summer/2014
• Zhang Xu, William & Mary, Summer/2014
• Terry Ching-Hsiang Hsu, Purdue, Summer/2014
• Jaewoo Lee, Purdue, Fall 2013
• Hayawardh Vijayakumar, PSU, Summer/2013
• Kangjie Lu, Gatech, Summer/2013
• Masoud Akhoondi, UCR, Summer/2013
• Jun Wang, the Pennsylvania State University, Fall/2012 (Co-advised with Zhiyun Qian and Zhenyu Wu)
• Vasileios Kermerlis, Columbia University, Summer/2012
• Qiang Nguyen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Summer/2012
• Long Lu, Georgia Tech. Intern, Summer/Fall 2011
• Zhenyu Wu, William & Mary. Intern, Fall 2011 and Spring 2012
   
• Hongyu Gao, Northwestern University. Collaborate since 2009
• Yinzhi Cao, Northwestern University. Collaborate since 2009
• Vaibhav Rastogi, Northwestern University. Collaborate since 2010
  

Teaching

• Guest lectures in EECS 340 - Introduction to Networking, Spring 2010
  
• Co-Instructor for EECS 450 - Internet Security, Spring 2010
• Teaching Assistant for EECS 328 - Numerical Methods for Engineers, Spring 2007
• Teaching Assistant for CS 395/495 - Introduction to Computer Security, Winter 2005

Professional Activities

• Program Committee, 2015 Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
• Program Committee, 2015 IEEE INFOCOM
• Program Committee, 2014 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS)
• Program Committee, 2014 IEEE CNS (IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security)
• Program Committee, 2014 IEEE INFOCOM
• Program Committee, 2014 ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communications Security (ASIACCS)
• Program Committee, 2014 MoST (Mobile Security Technologies Workshop)
• Program Committee, 2013 International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2013)
• Program Committee, 2013 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
• Program Committee, 2013 ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communications Security (ASIACCS)
• Program Committee, 2013 Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
• Program Committee, 2013 IEEE INFOCOM
• Program Committee, 2012 International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (AReS)
• Program Committee, 2012 ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communications Security (ASIACCS)
• Program Committee, 2012 WWW (World Wide Web Conference), the "Security, Privacy, Trust, and Abuse" track
• Program Committee, 2012 IEEE INFOCOM
• Program Committee, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications, Cloud Computing and Networking Symposium (ICNC-CLD)
• Poster Program Committee, 2011 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS)
• Web Chair, 2011 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS)
• Program Committee, 2011 IEEE GLOBECOM Next-Generation Networking (NGN) Symposium
• Program Committee, 2011 IEEE International Workshop on Security in Computers, Networking and Communications (SCNC)
• Program Committee, 2011 IEEE ICC Next-Generation Networking and Internet Symposium (ICC NGNI 2011)
• Program Committee, 2010 IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS 2010)
• Program Committee, 2010 IEEE GLOBECOM Next-Generation Networking (NGN) Symposium
• Program Committee, 2010 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference: VTC2010-Fall
• Program Committee, 2009 International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2009)

Links

• Curriculum Vitae