Brendan Dolan-Gavitt

Assistant Professor

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Brendan Dolan-Gavitt is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at NYU Tandon. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech (2014) and a BA in Math and Computer Science from Wesleyan University (2006).

Dolan-Gavitt's research interests span many areas of cybersecurity, including program analysis, virtualization security, memory forensics, and embedded and cyber-physical systems. His research focuses on developing techniques to ease or automate the understanding of large, real-world software systems in order to develop novel defenses against attacks, typically by subjecting them to static and dynamic analyses that reveal hidden and undocumented assumptions about their design and behavior.

His work has been presented at top security conferences such as the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. He also led the development of PANDA, an open-source platform for architecture-neutral dynamic analysis, which has users around the world and has been featured in technical press such as The Register. His most recent work, which focuses on developing techniques to probe industrial control systems for vulnerabilities, has been funded by the Office of Naval Research. Prior to joining NYU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University.

Research Interests: Security, Machine Learning, AI

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology 2014
Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

Wesleyan University 2006
Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science and Mathematics

Publications

Journal Articles

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Patrick Hulin, Engin Kirda, Tim Leek, Andrea Mambretti, Wil Robertson, Frederick Ulrich, Ryan Whelan. LAVA: Large-scale Automated Vulnerability Addition. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2016.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Josh Hodosh, Patrick Hulin, Tim Leek, and Ryan Whelan. Repeatable Reverse Engineering with PANDA. Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW), December 2015.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Tim Leek, Josh Hodosh, and Wenke Lee. Tappan Zee (North) Bridge: Mining Memory Accesses for Introspection. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2013.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Tim Leek, Michael Zhivich, Jonathon Giffin, and Wenke Lee. Virtuoso: Narrowing the Semantic Gap in Virtual Machine Introspection. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2011.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Abhinav Srivasta, Patrick Traynor, and Jonathon Giffin. Robust Signatures for Kernel Data Structures. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2009.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt. The VAD tree: A process-eye view of physical memory. Digital Investigation, Volume 4, Supplement 1, September 2007, Pages 62-64.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt. Forensic analysis of the Windows registry in memory. Digital Investigation, Volume 5, Supplement 1, September 2008, Pages S26-S32.

Other Publications

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Bryan Payne, and Wenke Lee. Leveraging Forensic Tools for Virtual Machine Introspection. Technical Report: GT-CS-11-05, May, 2011.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt and Yacin Nadji. See No Evil: Evasions in Honeymonkey Systems. May 2010.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt and Patrick Traynor. Using Kernel Type Graphs to Detect Dummy Structures. December 2008.