Wil Robertson

About

Wil Robertson is an interdisciplinary faculty member affiliated with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Engineering at Northeastern University. His research focuses on protecting systems from attacks, with specific interests in web security, anomaly detection, program analysis, and electronic voting security. He is part of the International Secure Systems Lab, a collaborative computer security research effort co-directed by his Northeastern colleague Engin Kirda. Prior to his tenure at Northeastern, Robertson was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in the computer security research group and a research assistant at UC Santa Barbara SecLab. He also co-founded WebWise Security, Inc., where he served as chief technology officer and contributed to the development of a high-speed anomaly-based web application firewall.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Security
• Programming language
• Operating system
• Embedded system
• Software engineering

Selected publications

• SoK: Enabling Security Analyses of Embedded Systems via Rehosting

  2021 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Closely monitoring the behavior of a software system during its execution enables developers and analysts to observe, and ultimately understand, how it works. This kind of dynamic analysis can be instrumental to reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, exploit development, and debugging. While these analyses are typically well-supported for homogeneous desktop platforms (e.g., x86 desktop PCs), they can rarely be applied in the heterogeneous world of embedded systems. One approach to enable…

  DOI

• Evaluating Synthetic Bugs

  2021 · 18 citations

  Fuzz testing has been used to find bugs in programs since the 1990s, but despite decades of dedicated research, there is still no consensus on which fuzzing techniques work best. One reason for this is the paucity of ground truth: bugs in real programs with known root causes and triggering inputs are difficult to collect at a meaningful scale. Bug injection technologies that add synthetic bugs into real programs seem to offer a solution, but the differences in finding these synthetic bugs versus…

  DOI

• HotFuzz: Discovering Temporal and Spatial Denial-of-Service Vulnerabilities Through Guided Micro-Fuzzing

  ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security · 2022-05-20 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Fuzz testing repeatedly assails software with random inputs in order to trigger unexpected program behaviors, such as crashes or timeouts, and has historically revealed serious security vulnerabilities. In this article, we present HotFuzz, a framework for automatically discovering Algorithmic Complexity (AC) time and space vulnerabilities in Java libraries. HotFuzz uses micro-fuzzing, a genetic algorithm that evolves arbitrary Java objects in order to trigger the worst-case performance for a met…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black-box Attacks Against Neural Binary Function Detection

  2023-10-03 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Binary analyses based on deep neural networks (DNNs), or neural binary analyses (NBAs), have become a hotly researched topic in recent years. DNNs have been wildly successful at pushing the performance and accuracy envelopes in the natural language and image processing domains. Thus, DNNs are highly promising for solving binary analysis problems that are hard due to a lack of complete information resulting from the lossy compilation process. Despite this promise, it is unclear that the prevailin…

  PublisherDOI

• ThreadLock: Native Principal Isolation Through Memory Protection Keys

  2023-07-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Inter-process isolation has been deployed in operating systems for decades, but secure intra-process isolation remains an active research topic. Achieving secure intra-process isolation within an operating system process is notoriously difficult. However, viable solutions that securely consolidate workloads into the same process have the potential to be extremely valuable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Taming Memory Corruption with Security Monitors

  NSF · $400k · 2019–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Engin Kirda

  Northeastern University

  74 shared

• William Phillips

  Dalhousie University

  65 shared

• Giovanni Vigna

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  42 shared

• Christopher Kruegel

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  33 shared

• Nauman Aslam

  23 shared

• S. Sivakumar

  20 shared

• Alireza Nafarieh

  Dalhousie University

  17 shared

• Sajjad Arshad

  Florida International University

  17 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral Scholar, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

  UC Berkeley

  2011

• PhD, Computer Science

  UC Santa Barbara

  2009

• BS, Computer Science

  UC Santa Barbara

  2002

Awards & honors

• $4.8M NSF renewal CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service Grant…
• $500K NSF grant for analysis tool (2014)
• NSF grant for cybersecurity workforce training (2012)

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

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