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
Research Intern
Applied Scientist Intern
Research Assistant
Cybersecurity Specialist Officer, Captain
Education
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Korea University
Selected Papers full list
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 |
| 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 |