Engin Kirda

About

Engin Kirda is a professor at Northeastern University, serving in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Engineering. He is the director of the Information Assurance Program, a joint PhD program offered by these colleges. His research focuses on security issues that have the potential to affect a large number of people, including malware analysis and detection, web security, social network security, reverse engineering, and intrusion detection. Professor Kirda is the co-founder and co-director of the International Secure Systems Lab, a collaborative effort of European and U.S. researchers dedicated to web security, malware and vulnerability analysis, and intrusion detection. He has contributed to the development of tools such as Anubis, FIRE, and Pixy, which are used for malware analysis, detecting hacked internet services, and vulnerability assessments for web pages, respectively. His academic background includes a PhD from the Technical University of Vienna, earned in 2002. He has been recognized as an IEEE Fellow and has received numerous awards for his contributions to cybersecurity research.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Security
• Computer hardware
• Human–computer interaction
• Computer network
• Operating system

Selected publications

• DICE: Automatic Emulation of DMA Input Channels for Dynamic Firmware Analysis

  2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · 2021 · 47 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Microcontroller-based embedded devices are at the core of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The security of these devices is of paramount importance. Among the approaches to securing embedded devices, dynamic firmware analysis (e.g., vulnerability detection) gained great attention lately, thanks to its offline nature and low false-positive rates. However, regardless of the analysis and emulation techniques used, existing dynamic firmware analyzers share a major limitatio…

  DOI

• On the Complexity of the Web’s PKI: Evaluating Certificate Validation of Mobile Browsers

  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2023-03-13 · 11 citations

  article

  Digital certificates are frequently used to secure communications between users and web servers. Critical to the Web’s PKI is the secure validation of digital certificates. Nonetheless, certificate validation itself is complex and error-prone. Moreover, it is also undermined by particular constraints of mobile browsers. However, these issues have long been overlooked. In this article, we undertook the first systematic and large-scale study of the certificate validation mechanism within popular m…

  PublisherDOI

• Gudifu: Guided Differential Fuzzing for HTTP Request Parsing Discrepancies

  2024-09-29 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  Modern web applications involve multiple HTTP processors on the traffic path, each acting as a reverse proxy and processing client requests. Even when such proxies are secure in isolation, when combined into complex systems, minor HTTP parsing discrepancies between them can lead to various severe attacks such as cache poisoning and HTTP request smuggling attacks.

  PublisherDOI

• OAuth 2.0 Redirect URI Validation Falls Short, Literally

  Annual Computer Security Applications Conference · 2023-12-02 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  OAuth 2.0 requires a complex redirection trail between websites and Identity Providers (IdPs). In particular, the "redirect URI" parameter included in the popular Authorization Grant Code flow governs the callback endpoint that users are routed to, together with their security tokens. The protocol specification, therefore, includes guidelines on protecting the integrity of the redirect URI.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AIM: Automatic Interrupt Modeling for Dynamic Firmware Analysis

  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2023-12-05 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  The security of microcontrollers, which drive modern IoT and embedded devices, continues to raise major concerns. Within a microcontroller (MCU), the firmware is a monolithic piece of software that contains the whole software stack, whereas a variety of peripherals represent the hardware. As MCU firmware contains vulnerabilities, it is ideal to test firmware with off-the-shelf software testing techniques, such as dynamic symbolic execution and fuzzing. Nevertheless, no emulator can emulate the d…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• TC: Small: Automatically Identifying Botnet Command and Control Infrastructures

  NSF · $486k · 2011–2015

• Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Rethinking Fuzzing for Security

  NSF · $600k · 2020–2025

• TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Automated Reverse Engineering of Commodity Software

  NSF · $500k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Kruegel

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  80 shared

• William Robertson

  University of Adelaide

  74 shared

• Davide Balzarotti

  EURECOM

  27 shared

• Kaan Onarlıoğlu

  Akamai (United States)

  23 shared

• Amin Kharraz

  Florida International University

  20 shared

• Manuel Egele

  Boston University

  19 shared

• Giovanni Vigna

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  19 shared

• Clemens Kerer

  TU Wien

  15 shared

Labs

• Northeastern University Systems Security LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2002

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1998

• B.S., Computer Engineering

  Middle East Technical University

  1996

Awards & honors

• Sy and Laurie Sternberg Interdisciplinary Chaired Professors…
• IEEE Fellow (2025)

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

• Xiaolin Xuh-84
• Ravinder Dahiyah-81
• Milica Stojanovich-63