Hyungsub Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Prof. Dongyan Xu, Prof. Antonio Bianchi, and Prof. Z. Berkay Celik. His main research interest lies in defeating all security threats against RVs. He has been tackling logic bugs via static and dynamic program analysis techniques. His works have been published at top-tier venues such as NDSS, S&P, and USENIX Security. He has received an outstanding reviewer award from VehicleSec'23.
Robotic vehicles (RVs) are used in a plethora of different real-world scenarios, such as submarines, rovers, and drones. Unfortunately, two main threats currently affect RVs: (1) logic bugs that make the RV software behave incorrectly under specific conditions; and (2) physical sensor attacks, such as GPS/GNSS spoofing. My research focuses on tackling both logic bugs and physical sensor attacks affecting RVs. I had been working on automatically detecting these bugs, helping developers fix them, and automatically verifying the correctness of the patches attempting to address them. Despite defeating logic bugs, RVs are still vulnerable to physical sensor attacks. Yet, RV developers rarely attempt to implement countermeasures for these attacks because they cannot reproduce them. In fact, successful attacks require specific preconditions that research papers do not explicitly explain. To bridge this gap, I have been working on automatically finding the preconditions that make sensor attacks successful in different conditions.