Hwiwon Lee

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I am a Computer Science PhD student at UIUC, advised by Lingming Zhang.

My research develops reproducible evaluations and dependable AI agents for software security, with the broader goal of making advanced models safer as their capabilities and autonomy grow. I build benchmarks that measure practical cybersecurity capabilities and agents that ground their findings in verifiable program evidence.

Research directions and highlights

Evaluating AI cybersecurity capabilities. SEC-bench (NeurIPS’25) evaluates repository-level vulnerability analysis and patching. SEC-bench Pro extends this to long-horizon security reasoning across 344 validated vulnerabilities in V8, SpiderMonkey, and the Linux kernel. KEX-bench (EMNLP’26, Oral) evaluates kernel exploit-generation capabilities through fine-grained verification of concrete security outcomes. My benchmarks have been adopted by OpenAI, DeepSeek, and NIST for frontier-model evaluation.

Dependable security agents. SLYP combines binary exploration with debugger-verified validation to discover vulnerabilities without source access. It has uncovered 40 Windows vulnerabilities (31 assigned CVEs) and received $203,000 in Microsoft bounty awards. My ongoing Odyssey project studies how coordinated, long-running agents accumulate and reuse verified knowledge across sessions to audit large software systems reliably. It has uncovered 250+ Windows vulnerabilities, all reported to Microsoft, with 50+ assigned CVEs.

Employment

OpenAI
Research Intern
May–Aug. 2026
Amazon
Applied Scientist Intern
May–Aug. 2025
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Research Assistant
2024–Present
Republic of Korea Air Force
Cybersecurity Specialist Officer, Captain
2017–2024

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2024 - Present
M.S. in Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2026
B.Eng. in Cyber Defense
Korea University
2017

Selected Papers full list

  1. Agentic Vulnerability Reasoning on COTS Binaries
    Hwiwon Lee*, Jongseong Kim*, and Lingming Zhang
    * Equal contribution
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05000, 2026
    40 Windows vulnerabilities (31 assigned CVEs) and $203,000 in Microsoft bounty awards
  2. SEC-bench Pro: Can Language Models Solve Long-Horizon Software Security Tasks?
    Hwiwon Lee, Jiawei Liu, Dongjun Kim, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26548, 2026
    Adopted by OpenAI, DeepSeek, and NIST for frontier-model evaluation + Google VRP $20,000 bounty
  3. Evaluating Coding Agents on Kernel Exploit Generation
    Junyoung Jang*, Gwanhyun Lee*, Hwiwon Lee*, and 4 more authors
    * Equal contribution
    In The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026
    Oral Presentation
  4. BENZENE: A Practical Root Cause Analysis System with an Under-Constrained State Mutation
    Younggi Park, Hwiwon Lee, Jinho Jung, and 2 more authors
    In 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland’24), 2024
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 Distinguished Paper Award

News

Sep 2026 Received a $100,000 OpenAI Grant: Daybreak for Frontline Defenders.
May 26, 2026 Our new preprint, SEC-bench Pro, evaluates frontier models on long-horizon vulnerability discovery across browser engines and the Linux kernel.
May 18, 2026 Joined OpenAI as a Research Intern for summer 2026.
May 06, 2026 Our new preprint, Agentic Vulnerability Reasoning on COTS Binaries, introduces SLYP for end-to-end vulnerability discovery and validation on production binaries.
Sep 22, 2025 Awarded $10k in credits from OpenAI for my research on AI for Cybersecurity