Chen Chen

📧: chenc@tamu.edu 

I am a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. I am an ordinary student, but I am incredibly fortunate to receive guidance from Prof. JV Rajendran and Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. They have entrusted me with critical projects and important tasks, providing ample opportunities for growth and self-improvement. I also appreciate the invaluable guidance from Prof. Joshua San Miguel and Prof. Di Wu, which has enlightened my path into the wondrous research world. Finally, I am thankful to all the people for their help and support during my Ph.D. life.

Research Interests

I strive to enhance the security of hardware by leveraging efficient and effective techniques for security vulnerability detection in hardware. Concretely, I am developing and evaluating various fuzzing techniques on their ability to detect different vulnerabilities, such as time-side channel and transient execution vulnerabilities. From detecting different vulnerabilities with minimal false positives to developing efficient, automated, scalable, and compatible verification techniques, I am interested in the interaction between fuzzing and other methodologies and how the other methodologies can aid a fuzzer to detect vulnerability faster!

My research is at the intersection of hardware security, optimization, and statistics. I publish in both security and computer-aided design (CAD) conferences.

Education

Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA (2020-present)

Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering

University of Wisconsin--Madison, Madison, WI, USA (2018-2020)

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA (2014-2018)

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering

Publications

MABFuzz: Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms for Fuzzing Processors

Vasudev Gohil, Rahul Kande, Chen Chen, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, and Jeyavijayan Rajendran

IEEE Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference, 2024

[paper]

PSOFuzz: Fuzzing Processors with Particle Swarm Optimization

Chen Chen*, Vasudev Gohil*, Rahul Kande, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Jeyavijayan Rajendran

IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, 2023

[paper][talk]

HyPFuzz: Formal-Assisted Processor Fuzzing

Chen Chen, Rahul Kande, Nathan Nguyen, Flemming Andersen, Aakash Tyagi, 

Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Jeyavijayan Rajendran

USENIX Security Symposium, 2023

[paper][website][talk]

Trusting the Trust Anchor: Towards Detecting Cross-Layer Vulnerabilities with Hardware Fuzzing

Chen Chen, Rahul Kande, Pouya Mahmoody, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Jeyavijayan Rajendran

IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, 2022

[paper]

Bufferless NoCs with Scheduled Deflection Routing

Chen Chen, Zirui Tao, Joshua San Miguel

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip, 2020

[paper]

Outside of research, I enjoy reading books and listening to music.