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In-Soo Yoon

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · Computer Science

About the Lab

Professor In-Soo Yoon's research lab specializes in computer security and system-level vulnerability analysis, with a focus on developing high-performance, practical techniques for detecting and mitigating software vulnerabilities. The lab explores hybrid fuzzing, hardware-assisted security mechanisms like data-flow isolation, and efficient debugging in production systems through integrated hardware-software tracing. Their work bridges the gap between theoretical security models and real-world deployment by emphasizing efficiency, scalability, and practical applicability in complex systems such as JavaScript engines, network processors, and cellular baseband firmware.

fuzzinghardware-assisted securitybinary analysisreverse debuggingsystem security

Research Overview

Papers
28
Total Citations
862
Papers (5y)
16
Primary Field
Computer Science

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
16total
2021
2022
2023
2025
2026
Citations per year (5y)
78total
20212022202320252026

Selected Papers

15
1
Article|272 citations·2018
QSYM: a practical concolic execution engine tailored for hybrid fuzzing
Insu Yun, Sang-Ho Lee, Meng Xu, Yeongjin Jang, Taesoo Kim
USENIX Security Symposium

Recently, hybrid fuzzing has been proposed to address the limitations of fuzzing and concolic execution by combining both approaches. The hybrid approach has shown its effectiveness in various synthetic benchmarks such as DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) binaries, but it still suffers from scaling to find bugs in complex, realworld software. We observed that the performance bottleneck of the existing concolic executor is the main limiting factor for its adoption beyond a small-scale study. T

SoftwareComputer Science
2
Article|144 citations·2012
Kargus
Muhammad Asim Jamshed, Jihyung Lee, Sangwoo Moon, Insu Yun, Kim Deok-jin, Sungryoul Lee, Yung Yi, KyoungSoo Park

As high-speed networks are becoming commonplace, it is increasingly challenging to prevent the attack attempts at the edge of the Internet. While many high-performance intrusion detection systems (IDSes) employ dedicated network processors or special memory to meet the demanding performance requirements, it often increases the cost and limits functional flexibility. In contrast, existing software-based IDS stacks fail to achieve a high throughput despite modern hardware innovations such as multi

Hardware and ArchitectureComputer Science
3
Article|115 citations·2016
HDFI: Hardware-Assisted Data-Flow Isolation
Chengyu Song, Hyungon Moon, Monjur Alam, Insu Yun, Byoungyoung Lee, Taesoo Kim, Wenke Lee, Yunheung Paek

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are the root cause of many modern attacks. Existing defense mechanisms are inadequate; in general, the software-based approaches are not efficient and the hardware-based approaches are not flexible. In this paper, we present hardware-assisted data-flow isolation, or, HDFI, a new fine-grained data isolation mechanism that is broadly applicable and very efficient. HDFI enforces isolation at the machine word granularity by virtually extending each memory unit with

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
4
Article|94 citations·2020
Fuzzing JavaScript Engines with Aspect-preserving Mutation
Soyeon Park, Wen Xu, Insu Yun, Daehee Jang, Taesoo Kim
OA

Fuzzing is a practical, widely-deployed technique to find bugs in complex, real-world programs like JavaScript engines. We observed, however, that existing fuzzing approaches, either generative or mutational, fall short in fully harvesting high-quality input corpora such as known proof of concept (PoC) exploits or unit tests. Existing fuzzers tend to destruct subtle semantics or conditions encoded in the input corpus in order to generate new test cases because this approach helps in discovering

SoftwareComputer Science
5
Article|56 citations·2016
APISan: Sanitizing API Usages through Semantic Cross-Checking
Insu Yun, Changwoo Min, Xujie Si, Yeongjin Jang, Taesoo Kim, Mayur Naik
USENIX Security Symposium
Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
6
Article|37 citations·2018
REPT: reverse debugging of failures in deployed software
Weidong Cui, Xinyang Ge, Baris Kasikci, Ben Niu, Upamanyu Sharma, Ruoyu Wang, Insu Yun
Operating Systems Design and Implementation

Debugging software failures in deployed systems is important because they impact real users and customers. However, debugging such failures is notoriously hard in practice because developers have to rely on limited information such as memory dumps. The execution history is usually unavailable because high-fidelity program tracing is not affordable in deployed systems.In this paper, we present REPT, a practical system that enables reverse debugging of software failures in deployed systems. REPT r

SoftwareComputer Science
7
Article|31 citations·2021
BaseSpec: Comparative Analysis of Baseband Software and Cellular Specifications for L3 Protocols
Eun-Soo Kim, Dongkwan Kim, CheolJun Park, Insu Yun, Yongdae Kim
OA

Cellular basebands play a crucial role in mobile communication. However, it is significantly challenging to assess their security for several reasons. Manual analysis is inevitable because of the obscurity and complexity of baseband firmware; however, such analysis requires repetitive efforts to cover diverse models or versions. Automating the analysis is also non-trivial because the firmware is significantly large and contains numerous functions associated with complex cellular protocols. There

Biomedical EngineeringEngineering
8
Article|29 citations·2017
CAB-Fuzz: Practical Concolic Testing Techniques for COTS Operating Systems.
Su Yong Kim, Sangho Lee, Insu Yun, Wen Xu, Byoungyoung Lee, Youngtae Yun, Taesoo Kim

Discovering the security vulnerabilities of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) operating systems (OSes) is challenging because they not only are huge and complex, but also lack detailed debug information. Concolic testing, which generates all feasible inputs of a program by using symbolic execution and tests the program with the generated inputs, is one of the most promising approaches to solve this problem. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art concolic testing tools do not scale well for testing CO

SoftwareComputer Science
9
Article|14 citations·2017
AVPASS: Leaking and Bypassing Antivirus Detection Model Automatically
Chanil Jeon, Insu Yun, Jinho Jung, Max Wolotsky, Taesoo Kim
Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
10
Article|13 citations·2021
Preventing Use-After-Free Attacks with Fast Forward Allocation
Brian Wickman, Hong Hu, Insu Yun, Daehee Jang, Jung Won Lim, Sanidhya Kashyap, Taesoo Kim
Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)OA

Memory-unsafe languages are widely used to implement critical systems like kernels and browsers, leading to thousands of memory safety issues every year. A use-after-free bug is a temporal memory error where the program accidentally visits a freed memory location. Recent studies show that use-after-free is one of the most exploited memory vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, previous efforts to mitigate use-after-free bugs are not widely deployed in real-world programs due to either inadequate accura

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
11
Preprint|13 citations·2019
Automatic Techniques to Systematically Discover New Heap Exploitation Primitives
Insu Yun, Dhaval Kapil, Taesoo Kim
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

Heap exploitation techniques to abuse the metadata of allocators have been widely studied since they are application independent and can be used in restricted environments that corrupt only metadata. Although prior work has found several interesting exploitation techniques, they are ad-hoc and manual, which cannot effectively handle changes or a variety of allocators. In this paper, we present a new naming scheme for heap exploitation techniques that systematically organizes them to discover the

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
12
Article|12 citations·2022
Scalable and Secure Virtualization of HSM With ScaleTrust
Juhyeng Han, Insu Yun, Seongmin Kim, Taesoo Kim, Sooel Son, Dongsu Han
SJR Q1IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Hardware security modules (HSMs) have been utilized as a trustworthy foundation for cloud services. Unfortunately, existing systems using HSMs fail to meet multi-tenant scalability arising from the emerging trends such as microservices, which utilize frequent cryptographic operations. As an alternative, cloud vendors provide HSMs as a service. However, such cloud-managed HSM usage models raise security concerns due to their untrusted and shared operating environment. We propose ScaleTrust, a sca

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
13
Article|10 citations·2021
HardsHeap: A Universal and Extensible Framework for Evaluating Secure Allocators
Insu Yun, Woosun Song, Seunggi Min, Taesoo Kim
OA

Secure allocators have been extensively studied to mitigate heap vulnerabilities. They employ safe designs and randomized mechanisms to stop or mitigate heap exploitation. Despite extensive research efforts, secure allocators can only be evaluated by with theoretical analysis or pre-defined data sets, which are insufficient to effectively reflect powerful adversaries in the real world.

Signal ProcessingComputer Science
14
Article|8 citations·2020
Automatic Techniques to Systematically Discover New Heap Exploitation Primitives
Insu Yun, Dhaval Kapil, Taesoo Kim
USENIX Security Symposium

Heap exploitation techniques to abuse the metadata of allocators have been widely studied since they are application independent and can be used in restricted environments that corrupt only metadata. Although prior work has found several interesting exploitation techniques, they are ad-hoc and manual, which cannot effectively handle changes or a variety of allocators. In this paper, we present a new naming scheme for heap exploitation techniques that systematically organizes them to discover t

Information SystemsComputer Science
15
Article|4 citations·2023
QueryX: Symbolic Query on Decompiled Code for Finding Bugs in COTS Binaries
Hyung-Seok Han, JeongOh Kyea, Yonghwi Jin, J.‐B. KANG, Brian Pak, Insu Yun

Extensible static checking tools, such as Sys and CodeQL, have successfully discovered bugs in source code. These tools allow analysts to write application-specific rules, referred to as queries. These queries can leverage the domain knowledge of analysts, thereby making the analysis more accurate and scalable. However, the majority of these tools are inapplicable to binary-only analysis. One exception, joern, translates a binary code into decompiled code and feeds the decompiled code into an or

SoftwareComputer Science

Research Areas

Artificial IntelligenceSoftwareComputer Networks and CommunicationsInformation SystemsHardware and ArchitectureBiomedical Engineering

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