In August 2022, the
USENIX Security Symposium published groundbreaking cybersecurity research papers by two UT Dallas computer science professors,
Dr. Shiyi Wei and
Dr. Kangkook Jee. Wei’s paper additionally received the symposium’s Distinguished Paper Award, identifying his work as one of the top cybersecurity discoveries of the year.
Like thieves looking for unlocked doors or windows, cybercriminals search for mistakes in software code that could allow them to break into computer networks to steal private data or launch attacks.
Dr. Shiyi Wei, assistant professor of
computer science at The University of Texas at Dallas
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, develops tools to prevent cyberattacks by finding and fixing coding errors before the software is deployed.
Most recently, Wei received a five-year, $458,849 National Science Foundation
Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award to improve static analysis, a tool that examines software for flaws that create security vulnerabilities.
One of the biggest challenges to fixing software bugs can be finding them.
With support from the National Science Foundation, computer scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas are going after some of the hardest-to-find errors, called variability bugs, which appear only when software is configured to work with certain hardware.
The researchers presented a framework they developed to detect variability bugs at the recent Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in Estonia. Variability bugs cannot typically be detected using off-the-shelf software analysis tools, said
Dr. Shiyi Wei, assistant professor of
computer science in the
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.