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CactiLab is in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Members of CactiLab are interested in security, privacy, and forensics in computer and communications systems. Current research foci include hardware-assisted, system, and software security.
Prof. Ziming Zhao is the director of CactiLab. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Arizona State University. Research outcomes of CactiLab have appeared in top-tier security conferences and journals, including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, DAC, MobiSys, RTAS, IMWUT, ACSAC, ESORICS, TISSEC/TOPS, TDSC, TIFS, etc.
The research of CactiLab has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE-C), and Department of Defense (DoD).
Please check out CactiLab’s open-source projects on GitHub and open lectures on YouTube.
CactiLab has multiple RA openings starting Fall 2025. See the ads
news
| Nov 22, 2024 | [Paper] Our paper entitled “Defending Against Membership Inference Attacks on Iteratively Pruned Deep Neural Networks” will appear in NDSS‘25! |
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| Aug 13, 2024 | [Paper] Our paper entitled “TokenScout: Early Detection of Ethereum Scam Tokens via Temporal Graph Learning” will appear in ACM CCS‘24! |
| Jul 13, 2024 | [Paper] Two papers “Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User Generated Content Games Using Large Vision Language Models” and “Unveiling IoT Security in Reality: A Firmware-Centric Journey” will appear in USENIX Security‘24! |
| May 13, 2024 | [Paper] Our paper entitled “SoK: Where’s the “up”?! A Comprehensive (bottom-up) Study on the Security of Arm Cortex-M Systems” will appear in USENIX WOOT‘24! |
| Apr 18, 2024 | [CTF] Team Cacti advised by Dr. Zhao and Dr. Hu placed 4th in MITRE eCTF 2024! |
| Mar 15, 2024 | [Paper] Our papers entitled “Building Your Own Trusted Execution Environments Using FPGA” (open-source repo at here) and “Command Hijacking on Voice-Controlled IoT in Amazon Alexa Platform” will appear in ACM AsiaCCS‘24! |
| Feb 15, 2024 | [Paper] Two papers on embedded system security “InsectACIDE: Debugger-Based Holistic Asynchronous CFI for Embedded System” and “Trusted Execution Environments in Embedded and IoT Systems: A CactiLab Perspective” will appear in IEEE RTAS‘24 and SEED‘24, respectively! |
| Jan 15, 2024 | [Paper] Our paper entitled “LocCams: An Efficient and Robust Approach for Detecting and Localizing Hidden Wireless Cameras via Commodity Devices” will appear in ACM IMWUT‘24! |