Event

ECE Colloquium - Yonghwi Kwon, UMD

Friday, September 11, 2026
3:30 p.m.
Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, Room 1110
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu

Speaker: Yonghwi Kwon, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland

Talk Title: Beyond the Evidence at Hand: Proactive Security Analysis for Evolving Computing Systems

Abstract: Security analyses often rely on assumptions about a system's programming language, execution environment, or available program state. These assumptions become increasingly fragile as platforms evolve and adversaries deliberately hide relevant behavior. My research seeks security solutions that remain effective amid these challenges, by developing techniques that do not simply accept given resources or execution, but rather construct and perturb systems and resources at appropriate abstraction layers to reach reliable security solutions.

This talk explores three complementary directions. First, I discuss how we can improve the security of emerging cyber-physical systems such as drone swarms. A fundamental challenge is the lack of an effective way to characterize and compare executions of collective flight behavior, making it difficult to determine why unsafe behavior occurs. My research introduces counterfactual executions into this setting, comparing an observed failure with carefully controlled alternatives to enable systematic analysis and testing of drone swarms. Second, I examine how we can conduct security analysis when critical evidence or analysis capabilities are inaccessible or absent. For example, I show how Python malware can be transformed into forensically equivalent programs that preserve the behavior relevant to an investigation while allowing existing decompilers to analyze artifacts that would otherwise resist decompilation. Third, I present how complex compromised programs containing malicious code can be effectively analyzed by forcibly executing their code while sharing relevant execution states. Together, these techniques point toward a practical path for securing complex and evolving computer systems in a principled and sustainable manner. Rather than building a new analysis for every platform or threat, we identify security-relevant invariants and actively construct the conditions under which they can be reliably observed and protected.

Bio: Yonghwi Kwon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), and UMIACS). His research interests include software security, software engineering, and cyber forensics. He has been honored with NSF CAREER Award, NSF
CRII Award, ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award, ASE Best Paper Award, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award.