I am Chen Cao, an Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, The Behrend College. Before joining Behrend, I was a post-doctoral researcher in Dr. Peng Liu’s cybersecurity lab in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. I received my Ph.D. at the University of China Academy of Sciences (2011-2017) and my bachelor’s degree at China University of Mining and Technology (2007-2011).

My research interest is in systems security. Systems security is a subject which focuses on attack and defense. To attack a system, the adversary must have the knowledge of weaknesses in the system and exploit them to perform attacks. To defend a system, the defender has to be aware of weaknesses and protect the system by patching it or adding resilience to the system. That is to say, the weakness, i.e., vulnerability, is the key role in systems security research.

“If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous battles without jeopardy.”
– The Art of War, Sun Tzu

In the war between the adversary and the defender, whether knowing vulnerabilities in one system determines whether an attack can be performed or be defeated. My research philosophy is to grab the key role to protect systems, and goes through a spiral which starts from vulnerability discovery and analysis, dealing with vulnerabilities with novel security design, to a new loop on new systems.

News

Recent Publications (Full List)

  • Device-agnostic Firmware Execution is Possible: A Concolic Execution Approach for Peripheral Emulation
    Chen Cao, Le Guan, Jiang Ming and Peng Liu
    ACSAC ‘20: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
    Austin, USA, December 2020.

  • Protecting Mobile Devices from Physical Memory Attacks with Targeted Encryption
    Le Guan, Chen Cao, Sencun Zhu, Jingqiang Lin, Peng Liu, Yubin Xia and Bo Luo
    The 12th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, (WiSec)
    Miami, USA, May 2019.

  • CryptMe: Data Leakage Prevention for Unmodified Programs on ARM Devices
    Chen Cao, Le Guan, Ning Zhang, Jingqiang Lin, Bo Luo, Neng Gao, Peng Liu, Ji Xiang and Wenjing Lou
    The 21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, (RAID)
    Heraklion, Greece, September 2018.

  • Building a Trustworthy Execution Environment to Defeat Exploits from both Cyber Space and Physical Space for ARM
    Le Guan, Chen Cao, Peng Liu, Xinyu Xing, Xinyang Ge, Shengzhi Zhang, Meng Yu and Trent Jaeger
    IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2018.