A system therapist, dataset wizard, Email troubleshooter, website ninja.

And just maybe, a programmer.

"An apple device a day keeps doctoral degree away."

News

Last update: Sep 15, 2023

Paper accepted in NDSS 2024! Like, Comment, Get Scammed: Characterizing Comment Scams on Media Platforms

I have successfully defended my Ph.D thesis, “Measuring the Role of Automation in Malicious Web Activities” on August 4th, 2023.

Measuring the Role of Automation in Malicious Web Activities

Paper accepted in WWW 2023! Scan Me If You Can: Understanding and Detecting Unwanted Vulnerability Scanning

Paper accepted in NDSS 2023! Double and Nothing: Understanding and Detecting Cryptocurrency Giveaway Scams

Paper Accepted at Oakland 2021! Good Bot, Bad Bot: Characterizing Automated Browsing Activity

About Me

I am a Ph.D graduated in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.

During my Ph.D, I am co-advised by Professor Nick Nikiforakis and Professor Amir Rahmati. My research focuses on web security and machine learning. On one side, I develop systems to measure and classify automated Internet bots through both machine-learning and heuristic approaches, capture malicious bot behaviors by developing “fingerprinting” techniques. On the other side, I aim to build lightweight and pragmatic deep learning models and use information retrieval techniques to get security insights.

Prior to Stony Brook, I worked on file system security and optimization. My work of disaster-tolerance of MooseFS can be found in here(github), as well as some published paper.

Research Projects

• Understanding and Detecting Cryptocurrency Giveaway Scams (Paper Accepted at NDSS 2023!) Paper website

  • First large-scale analysis over cryptocurrency giveaway scams.
  • Created automated cryptocurrency scam tracking systems to capture cryptocurrency scam webpages.
  • Collected 10,079 scam web pages in 6 months, extracted 2,266 cryptocurrency scam wallets.
  • Inititated first quantitative analysis to cryptocurrency scam fund loss – attackers have stolen the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars ($26M – $70M).
• Understanding and Detecting Unwanted Vulnerability Scanning (Paper Accepted at WWW 2023!)
  • Designed a testbed for web vulnerability scanners (WVS)
  • Observed differences between WVS and users though user study
  • Designed ScannerScope - supervised machine learning model classifies user vs. WVS

• Measuring Web Bot Ecosystem (Paper Accepted at Oakland 2021!) Paper PDF

  • Created automatic systems that can deploy honeypot-like web servers to capture web bot activities.
  • Developed behavioral fingerprinting techniques to detect bot behavior and intention.
  • Analyzed bot behaviors, discover malicious bot intentions of bruteforcing, probing and exploiting vulnerabilities.
  • Created visualization of captured bot dataset, provide security insights.

• Malware Classification with Deep Neural Network using Lightweight Emulation Talk PDF

  • Developed automated malware emulation pipeline, emulated 11 Million malwares with cost <10 hours for EMBER’17 dataset
  • Extracted malware API call sequence, memory access information and RWX counter
  • Trained lightGBM and character level CNN model, achieved 0.99 AUROC / 0.98 accuracy
  • Developed a hybrid CNN model classifying malware families, reached 0.96 accuracy

• Malicious URL detection for mobile browsers through Deep Neural Network

  • Crawled both malicious and benign URLs from multiple sources
  • Trained a classifier through CNN and RNN(LSTM).
  • Make the model mobile-available, built a browser demo intergrated with ML model.

Other Projects

Other than major research threads, I build mini-projects for testing new techniques and for fun.

• Animal breed classification with deep neural network github

  • Trained a modified VGG16 model to classify cat/dog images and their specific breeds
  • Fine-tuned hyperparameters to achieve best accuracy.
  • Developed web app interface to classify animal breed from URL.

• Empirical study with time series data from Anime market github

  • Crawled anime ranking data from 2006 to 2021, extracted anime ranking and scoring data through websites, built a clean ranking dataset
  • Analyzed anime ranking trend, visualized with dynamic video [youtube video]
  • Analyzed popular anime picture tags through Safebooru, extracted popular tags from 2011 to 2021
  • Designed a decay algorithm to measure the popularity of tags over time.
  • Built and fine-tuned a multi-label classifier for anime figures based on a modified VGG-19 model; the model can predict possible tags from any anime figures.

• Anime face dataset and generation through generative adversarial network

  • Used face alignment technique to extract faces from ~30,000 anime portraits and ~2,500 cosplay human faces, build a anime-face oriented dataset.
  • Generated anime faces through styleGAN2, with aligned 15,000 anime faces through face detection.
• safebooru tag trend from 2010-2020: https://you.stonybrook.edu/xigaoli/safebooru-anime-tag-trend-analysis/
• Another mock personal homepage, but built through Wangler workers: https://my-worker.lxgfrom2009.workers.dev/
• Simple but pragmatic tool blocking SogouInput ads and tracking: https://github.com/xigaoli/sgcld

Lastly, I have something else that is interesting.