Dongyan Xu

Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science

Director of CERIAS

Joined department: Fall 2001

Education

Dongyan Xu is a Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science and Director of CERIAS, Purdue's cybersecurity research center. His research focuses on cyber and cyber-physical security. He has also made early contributions to the areas of cloud computing and peer-to-peer media streaming/distribution. He is part of the Purdue System Security Lab (PurSec).

For computer system security, Xu and his students have been developing virtualization-based systems for capturing, investigating, and defending against stealthy computer malware (e.g., worms, rootkits, bots, and APTs). His team is also developing reverse engineering techniques for the analysis of binary artifacts such as binary programs and memory images. For cloud computing, Xu and his students have been developing advanced techniques for the creation, management, and performance optimization of virtual networked infrastructures on top of physical cloud infrastructures.

Xu received six Seed for Success Awards from Purdue University, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (2006), and seven Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards from the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2008), ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC 2011), IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2013), USENIX Security Symposium (2014, Best Student Paper), ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2015), Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS 2016), and USENIX Security Symposium (2017). He served on the Editorial Board of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS) and has served on program committees of major security and cloud computing conferences (e.g., CCS, NDSS, S&P, USENIX Security, and SOCC). He was selected a University Faculty Scholar in 2012 and has received the College of Science Undergraduate Advising (2008), Graduate Advising (2014), Leadership (2013, 2016), Research (2015), and Team (2015, 2017) Awards. Past and current sponsors of Xu's research include the AFOSR, AFRL, Army CERDEC, DARPA, IARPA, NSA, NSF, ONR, Sandia National Labs, Cisco Systems, DOCOMO USA Labs, ETRI, Microsoft Research, Northrop Grumman, Vencore Labs, Southwest Research Institute, and Purdue Research Foundation. He has been involved in research grants totaling more than $132 million and has been the PI of research projects totaling more than $36 million.

Selected Publications