Yeongjin Jang

Yeongjin Jang

Principal Software Engineer

Samsung Research America

Building Unexploitable Systems!

Dr. Yeongjin Jang is an elite cybersecurity researcher. He hacks CPU, OS, iPhone, IoT devices, and anything that is operated by computers. He is interested in trustworthy computing, vulnerability discovery and analysis, side-channel attack and defense, developing new exploit primitives, mobile security, practical applied cryptography, jailbreaking, and ‘buidl’ing defense mechanisms.

His prior research projects covered in popular media including: MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Reuters, CNN, CBS News, Wired, Telegraph, and many more.

In addition to the academic works, he has been enjoying playing capture-the-flag (CTF) contests. He is fortunate to be an advisor of OSUSEC, the team advanced to the DEF CON 30 CTF Final in 2022, and he received the Black Badge(s) from DEF CON, as the winner (team DEFKOR) of DEF CON 23 CTF (2015) and the winner (team DEFKOR00t) of DEF CON 26 CTF (2018).

You can watch demo videos of my hacks from below:

Interests
  • Cybersecurity/Hacking
  • Automated Vulnerability Discovery
  • Operating Systems Security
  • Software Security
  • Applied Cryptography
Education
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2017

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • M.S. in Computer Science, 2016

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • B.S. in Computer Science, 2010

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

News

  • [02/28/2024] RSTI has conditionally been accepted to ASPLOS 24. The work can mitigate potential malicious behaviors in 3rd-party code (a.k.a. supply-chain attacks) without any annotation on the code!
  • [08/21/2023] We are hiring vulnerability researchers. Please drop me an email if you are interested in working with us at Samsung Research America.
  • [07/16/2023] QSYM won the Frontiers of Science Award in Crytpography and Information Security area from the International Congress of Basic Science.

Recent Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2024). GENESIS: A Generalizable, Efficient, and Secure Intra-kernel Privilege Separation (to appear). In Proceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC).

(2024). Enforcing C/C++ Type and Scope at Runtime for Control-Flow and Data-Flow Integrity (to appear). In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).

Source Document

(2024). SGX-USB: Secure USB I/O Path for Secure Enclaves. In Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).

PDF

(2023). Protect the System Call, Protect (most of) the World with BASTION. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).

PDF

(2022). Practical Privacy-Preserving Authentication for SSH. In Proceedings of the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (Security).

PDF Slides Video

(2022). A Survey on Sensor False Data Injection Attacks and Countermeasures in Cyber-physical and Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the 23rd World Conference on Information Security Applications (WISA).

(2022). Tightly Seal Your Sensitive Pointers with PACTIGHT. In Proceedings of the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (Security).

PDF Slides Video Source Document

Teaching

I have been teaching the following courses at Oregon State University (median course evaluation score attached, max 6.0):

To review how I teach at OSU, you can visit my Ratemyprofessor Profile.

Advising

I am fortunate to advise the following great researchers and students at Oregon State University:

  • Akshith Gunasekaran (PhD, co-advised with Dr. Rakesh Bobba, Spring 2018 – present)
  • Ping-Jui Liao (PhD, Fall 2018 – present)
  • Jinhong Choi (MS, Spring 2019 – present)
  • Andrew Quach (MS, Summer 2019 – present)
  • Jonathan Keller (MS, Spring 2022 – present)
  • Lucas Ball (BS, Winter 2022 – present)
  • Rudy Peralta (BS, Spring 2022 – present)
  • Casey Colley (BS, Fall 2022 – present)

Alumni of my research group are:

  • Philiph Lee (MS, Winter 2021 – December 2022)
  • Kihwan Kim (Ph.D. Student Intern from KAIST, Jan 2022 – Jun 2022)
  • Changil Lim (Ph.D. Student Intern from KAIST, Jan 2022 – Jun 2022)
  • Taehyun Kim (Ph.D. Student Intern from KAIST, Jan 2022 – Jun 2022)
  • Ryan Kennedy (MS, Fall 2020 – Jun 2022)
  • Lyell Read (BS, Honors College, Summer 2019 – Jun 2022)
  • Cody Holliday (MS, Fall 2018 – Dec 2021)
  • Hadi Rahal-Arabi (MS, Winter 2019 – Sep 2021)
  • Phillip Mestas III (MS, Spring 2019 – Jun 2021)
  • Zander Nead-Work (BS, RELU, Summer 2019 – Jun 2021)
  • Khuong Luu (BS, Honors College, Spring 2019 – Dec 2020)
  • Jangha Kim (Researcher at NSRI, Apr 2019 – Mar 2020)
  • Sera Lee (Ph.D. Student Intern from KAIST, Jan 2019 – Aug 2019)
  • Travis Whitehead (Faculty Research Assistant, Sep 2019 – Jul 2020)

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Principal Software Engineer
August 2023 – Present Mountain View, CA (work remotely at Vancouver, WA)
Conduct Vulnerability Research on Samsung’s Products
 
 
 
 
 
Assistant Professor
October 2017 – June 2023 Corvallis, Oregon
Teaches hacking (attacks), cybersecurity (defenses), opearting systems (foundations), and many more day-to-day living skills for cyber ninjas.
 
 
 
 
 
Chief Engineer
Security Axioms
January 2013 – December 2014 Atlanta, GA
Worked at a research spin-off company during my Ph.D. study.
 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Research Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology
August 2010 – August 2017 Atlanta, GA
Peeeeee-aiche-Dee!