Wei You

I am currently an associate professor in School of Information, Renmin University of China. Before joining RUC, I did two-year (2017-2019) postdoctoral researcher in Department of Computer Science at Purdue University; and one-year (2016-2017) postdoctoral researcher in School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. I obtained my Ph.D. from Renmin University of China in 2016.

I am broadly interested in software engineering and software security. My work aims to build testing and analysis techniques for improving the reliability and security of complex software systems. My research has been recognized with several awards, including ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award and CCF Award for Innovation on Computer Science and Engineering (Nature Science Award). My CV can be downloaded here.

• Software Engineering: [ISSTA 2024] [S&P 2021a] [S&P 2020] [OOPSLA 2019] [TDSC 2020] [SECURITY 2021] [CCS 2017b] [ICSE 2016a] [ASIACCS 2015] [ICSE 2020] [WWW 2016]
• Software Security: [S&P 2025] [SECURITY 2024] [ICSE 2023] [ISSTA 2022] [S&P 2021b] [S&P 2019] [ICSE 2019] [CCS 2017a] [ICSE 2016b]

• CCF Award for Innovation on Computer Science and Engineering (Nature Science Award)
• ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award
• CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists
• Outstanding Instructor for Extracurricular Teaching of Undergraduate Students

PC Member

• 32nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2025)
• 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024)
• 31st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024)
• 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2023)
• 30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2021)

Reviewer

• IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
• Journal of Computer & Security (JSC)

Current Students

• Yifei Zhan (Undergraduate Student)
• Boyu Liu (Undergraduate Student)
• Dongnan He (Master Student)
• Dongchen Xie (Master Student)
• Yang Zi (Master Student)
• Langyi Lu (Master Student)
• Run Lin (Master Student, co-advised with Prof. Jianjun Huang)
• Jiangfeng Yuan (PhD Student)
• Yujie Wang (PhD Student, co-advised with Prof. Wenchang Shi)
• Zhuo Wang (PhD Student)

• BridgeRouter: Automated Capability Upgrading of Out-Of-Bounds Write Vulnerabilities to Arbitrary Memory Write Primitives in the Linux Kernel
  Dongchen Xie, Dongnan He, Wei You*, Jianjun Huang, Bin Liang, Shuitao Gan, Wenchang Shi
  Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2025)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 15%)


• Fight Fire with Fire: Combating Adversarial Patch Attacks using Pattern-randomized Defensive Patches
  Jianan Feng, Jiachun Li, Changqing Miao, Jianjun Huang, Wei You, Wenchang Shi, Bin Liang
  Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2025)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 15%)


• Define-Use Guided Path Exploration for Better Forced Execution
  Dongnan He, Dongchen Xie, Yujie Wang, Wei You*, Bin Liang, Jianjun Huang, Wenchang Shi, Zhuo Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 21%)


• FuzzInMem: Fuzzing Programs via In-Memory Structures
  Xuwei Liu, Wei You, Yapeng Ye, Zhuo Zhang, Jianjun Huang, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 46th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 22%)


• Operand-Variation-Oriented Differential Analysis for Fuzzing Binding Calls in PDF Readers
  Suyue Guo, Xinyu Wang, Wei You*, Bin Liang, Wenchang Shi, Yiwei Zhang, Jianjun Huang, Jian Zhang
  Proceedings of the 45th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 26%)


• AIFORE: Smart Fuzzing Based on Automatic Input Format Reverse Engineering
  Ji Shi, Zhun Wang, Zhiyao Feng, Yang Lan, Shisong Qin, Wei You, Wei Zou, Mathias Payer, Chao Zhang
  Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (SECURITY 2023)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 29%)


• TensileFuzz: Facilitating Seed Input Generation in Fuzzing via String Constraint Solving
  Xuwei Liu, Wei You*, Zhuo Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2022)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 24%)


• OSPREY: Recovery of Variable and Data Structure via Probabilistic Analysis for Stripped Binary
  Zhuo Zhang, Yapeng Ye, Wei You*, Guanghong Tao, Wen-chuan Lee, Yonghwi Kwon, Yousra Aafer, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposiums on Security and Privacy (S&P 2021)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 12%)


• STOCHFUZZ: Sound and Cost-effective Fuzzing of Stripped Binaries by Incremental and Stochastic Rewriting
  Zhuo Zhang, Wei You*, Guanghong Tao, Yousra Aafer, Xuwei Liu, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposiums on Security and Privacy (S&P 2021)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 12%)
  🏆CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists


• Android SmartTVs Vulnerability Discovery via Log-guided Fuzzing
  Yousra Aafer, Wei You*, Yi Sun, Yu Shi, Xiangyu Zhang, Heng Yin
  Proceedings of the 30th Usenix Security Symposium (SECURITY 2021)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 19%)


• PMP: Cost-effective Forced Execution with Probabilistic Memory Pre-planning
  Wei You, Zhuo Zhang, Yonghwi Kwon, Yousra Aafer, Fei Peng, Yu Shi, Carson Harmon, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposiums on Security and Privacy (S&P 2020)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 12%)


• Finding Client-side Business Flow Tampering Vulnerabilities
  I Luk Kim, Yunhui Zheng, Hogun Park, Weihang Wang, Wei You, Yousra Aafer, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2020)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 21%)


• TaintMan: An ART-compatible Dynamic Taint Analysis Framework on Unmodified and Non-rooted Android Devices
  Wei You, Bin Liang, Wenchang Shi, Peng Wang, Xiangyu Zhang
  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC 2020)
  (CCF A)


• BDA: Practical Dependence Analysis for Binary Executables by Unbiased Whole-program Path Sampling and Per-path Abstract Interpretation
  Zhuo Zhang, Wei You*, Guanhong Tao, Guannan Wei, Yonghwi Kwon, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2019)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 36%)
  🏆ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award


• ProFuzzer: On-the-fly Input Type Probing for Better Zero-day Vulnerability Discovery
  Wei You, Xueqiang Wang, Shiqing Ma, Jianjun Huang, Xiangyu Zhang, XiaoFeng Wang, Bin Liang
  Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Symposiums on Security and Privacy (S&P 2019)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 11%)
  🏆CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists


• SLF: Fuzzing without Valid Seed Inputs
  Wei You, Xuwei Liu, Shiqing Ma, David Perry, Xiangyu Zhang, Bin Liang
  Proceedings of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 21%)


• SemFuzz: Semantics-based Automatic Generation of Proof-of-concept Exploits
  Wei You, Peiyuan Zong, Kai Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Xiaojing Liao, Pan Bian, Bin Liang
  Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2017)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 18%)


• Mass Discovery of Android Traffic Imprints through Instantiated Partial Execution
  Yi Chen, Wei You, Yeonjoon Lee, Kai Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Wei Zou
  Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2017)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 18%)


• Reference Hijacking: Patching, Protecting and Analyzing on Unmodified and Non-Rooted Android Devices
  Wei You, Bin Liang, Wenchang Shi, Shuyang Zhu, Peng Wang, Sikefu Xie, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2016)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 19%)


• AntMiner: Mining More Bugs by Reducing Noise Interference
  Bin Liang, Pan Bian, Yan Zhang, Wenchang Shi, Wei You, Yan Cai
  Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2016)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 19%)


• Cracking Classifiers for Evasion: A Case Study on the Google’s Phishing Pages Filter
  Bin Liang, Miaoqiang Su, Wei You, Wenchang Shi, Gang Yang
  Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016)
  (CCF A, Acceptance Rate: 16%)