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SooEul Son

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · 情報科学

研究室紹介

Professor SooEul Son's research lab specializes in cybersecurity, with a focus on securing dynamic and interactive web and network systems. The lab investigates vulnerabilities in access control, input validation, and cross-origin communication in modern web applications and software-defined networks. Key research directions include static analysis for detecting missing security checks, formal verification of network flow policies, and the security of client-side mechanisms like postMessage. The lab develops practical tools such as Flover, ROLECAST, and FIXMEUP to identify and prevent common yet critical security flaws in real-world systems.

web securitystatic analysisaccess controlnetwork securitysoftware verification

Research Overview

Papers
58
Total Citations
1,150
Papers (5y)
29
Primary Field
情報科学

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
29total
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
Citations per year (5y)
200total
20222023202420252026

Selected Papers

15
1
Article|144 citations·2013
Model checking invariant security properties in OpenFlow
Sooel Son, Seungwon Shin, Vinod Yegneswaran, Phillip Porras, Guofei Gu

The OpenFlow (OF) switching specification represents an innovative and open standard for enabling the dynamic programming of flow control policies in production networks. Unfortunately, thus far researchers have paid little attention to the development of methods for verifying that dynamic flow policies inserted within an OpenFlow network do not violate the network's underlying security policy. We introduce Flover, a model checking system which verifies that the aggregate of flow policies instan

Computer Networks and CommunicationsComputer Science
2
Article|104 citations·2019
Cybercriminal Minds: An investigative study of cryptocurrency abuses in the Dark Web
Seunghyeon Lee, Changhoon Yoon, Heedo Kang, Yeonkeun Kim, Yongdae Kim, Dongsu Han, Sooel Son, Seungwon Shin
OA

The Dark Web is notorious for being a major distribution channel of harmful content as well as unlawful goods.Perpetrators have also used cryptocurrencies to conduct illicit financial transactions while hiding their identities.The limited coverage and outdated data of the Dark Web in previous studies motivated us to conduct an in-depth investigative study to understand how perpetrators abuse cryptocurrencies in the Dark Web.We designed and implemented MFScope, a new framework which collects Dark

Information SystemsComputer Science
3
Book Chapter|96 citations·2010
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to DNS Cache Poisoning
Sooel Son, Vitaly Shmatikov
SJR Q4Lecture notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
Computer Networks and CommunicationsComputer Science
4
Article|94 citations·2022
Revisiting Binary Code Similarity Analysis Using Interpretable Feature Engineering and Lessons Learned
Dongkwan Kim, Eun‐Soo Kim, Sang Kil, Sooel Son, Yongdae Kim
SJR Q1IEEE Transactions on Software EngineeringOA

Binary code similarity analysis (BCSA) is widely used for diverse security applications such as plagiarism detection, software license violation detection, and vulnerability discovery. Despite the surging research interest in BCSA, it is significantly challenging to perform new research in this field for several reasons. First, most existing approaches focus only on the end results, namely, increasing the success rate of BCSA by adopting uninterpretable machine learning. Moreover, they utilize t

Information SystemsComputer Science
5
Article|78 citations·2016
What Mobile Ads Know About Mobile Users
Sooel Son, Daehyeok Kim, Vitaly Shmatikov
OA

We analyze the software stack of popular mobile advertising libraries on Android and investigate how they protect the users of advertising-supported apps from malicious advertising. We find that, by and large, Android advertising libraries properly separate the privileges of the ads from the host app by confining ads to dedicated browser instances that correctly apply the same origin policy.

Information SystemsComputer Science
6
Article|73 citations·2011
RoleCast
Sooel Son, Kathryn S. McKinley, Vitaly Shmatikov

Web applications written in languages such as PHP and JSP are notoriously vulnerable to accidentally omitted authorization checks and other security bugs. Existing techniques that find missing security checks in library and system code assume that (1) security checks can be recognized syntactically and (2) the same pattern of checks applies universally to all programs. These assumptions do not hold for Web applications. Each Web application uses different variables and logic to check the user's

Information SystemsComputer Science
7
Article|69 citations·2013
Diglossia
Sooel Son, Kathryn S. McKinley, Vitaly Shmatikov

Code injection attacks continue to plague applications that incorporate user input into executable programs. For example, SQL injection vulnerabilities rank fourth among all bugs reported in CVE, yet all previously proposed methods for detecting SQL injection attacks suffer from false positives and false negatives.

Information SystemsComputer Science
8
Article|61 citations·2013
The Postman Always Rings Twice: Attacking and Defending postMessage in HTML5 Websites.
Sooel Son, Vitaly Shmatikov

The postMessage mechanism in HTML5 enables Web content from different origins to communicate with each other, thus relaxing the same origin policy. It is especially popular in websites that include third-party content. Each message contains accurate information about its origin, but the receiver must check this information before accepting the message. The responsibility for preventing cross-origin attacks is thus partially delegated from the Web browser to the implementors of postMessage receiv

Information SystemsComputer Science
9
Article|60 citations·2013
Fix Me Up: Repairing Access-Control Bugs in Web Applications
Sooel Son, Kathryn S. McKinley, Vitaly Shmatikov

Access-control policies in Web applications ensure that only authorized users can perform security-sensitive operations. These policies usually check user credentials before executing actions such as writing to the database or navigating to privileged pages. Typically, every Web application uses its own, hand-crafted program logic to enforce access control. Within a single application, this logic can vary between different user roles, e.g., administrator or regular user. Unfortunately, developer

Information SystemsComputer Science
10
Article|50 citations·2011
SAFERPHP
Sooel Son, Vitaly Shmatikov

Web applications are vulnerable to semantic attacks such as denial of service due to infinite loops caused by malicious inputs and unauthorized database operations due to missing security checks. Unlike "conventional" threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, these attacks exploit bugs in the logic of the vulnerable application and cannot be discovered using data-flow analysis alone.

Information SystemsComputer Science
11
Article|39 citations·2018
Pride and Prejudice in Progressive Web Apps
Jiyeon Lee, Hayeon Kim, Jung-Hwan Park, Insik Shin, Sooel Son

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a new generation of Web application designed to provide native app-like browsing experiences even when a browser is offline. PWAs make full use of new HTML5 features which include push notification, cache, and service worker to provide short-latency and rich Web browsing experiences. We conduct the first systematic study of the security and privacy aspects unique to PWAs. We identify security flaws in main browsers as well as design flaws in popular third-party push

Information SystemsComputer Science
12
Preprint|31 citations·2020
Montage: A Neural Network Language Model-Guided JavaScript Engine Fuzzer
Suyong Lee, Hyung-Seok Han, Sang Kil, Sooel Son
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

JavaScript (JS) engine vulnerabilities pose significant security threats affecting billions of web browsers. While fuzzing is a prevalent technique for finding such vulnerabilities, there have been few studies that leverage the recent advances in neural network language models (NNLMs). In this paper, we present Montage, the first NNLM-guided fuzzer for finding JS engine vulnerabilities. The key aspect of our technique is to transform a JS abstract syntax tree (AST) into a sequence of AST subtree

SoftwareComputer Science
13
Article|31 citations·2021
Security Analysis on Practices of Certificate Authorities in the HTTPS Phishing Ecosystem
Doowon Kim, Haehyun Cho, Yonghwi Kwon, Adam Doupé, Sooel Son, Gail‐Joon Ahn, Tudor Dumitraş

Phishing attacks are causing substantial damage albeit extensive effort in academia and industry. Recently, a large volume of phishing attacks transit toward adopting HTTPS, leveraging TLS certificates issued from Certificate Authorities (CAs), to make the attacks more effective. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the security practices of CAs in the HTTPS phishing ecosystem. We focus on the CAs, critical actors under-studied in previous literature, to better understand the impor

Information SystemsComputer Science
14
Article|24 citations·2022
Link: Black-Box Detection of Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities Using Reinforcement Learning
Soyoung Lee, Seongil Wi, Sooel Son
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Black-box web scanners have been a prevalent means of performing penetration testing to find reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf black-box web scanners suffer from unscalable testing as well as false negatives that stem from a testing strategy that employs fixed attack payloads, thus disregarding the exploitation of contexts to trigger vulnerabilities. To this end, we propose a novel method of adapting attack payloads to a target reflected XSS vulne

Information SystemsComputer Science
15
Article|22 citations·2020
FUSE: Finding File Upload Bugs via Penetration Testing
Taekjin Lee, Seongil Wi, Suyong Lee, Sooel Son
OA

An Unrestricted File Upload (UFU) vulnerability is a critical security threat that enables an adversary to upload her choice of a forged file to a target web server. This bug evolves into an Unrestricted Executable File Upload (UEFU) vulnerability when the adversary is able to conduct remote code execution of the uploaded file via triggering its URL. We design and implement FUSE, a penetration testing tool designed to discover UFU and UEFU vulnerabilities in server-side PHP web applications. The

Information SystemsComputer Science

Research Areas

Information SystemsArtificial IntelligenceComputer Networks and CommunicationsSignal ProcessingSoftwareHardware and Architecture

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