Heqing Huang

Heqing Huang

Hack your life

Welcome to Heqing Huang’s homepage!

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong! Previously, I was a postdoc research fellow in the AST Lab at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Zhendong Su. I am also fortunate to obtain my Ph.D. supervised by Prof. Charles Zhang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. My research focuses on software security, especially leveraging program analysis techniques to ensure software security rigorously. Specifically, my research takes advantage of both static and dynamic program analysis techniques as complements to address deficiency problems in existing vulnerability detection methods, such as fuzzing (S&P’20, 22, 24ab, TDSC’23, FSE’21, ISSTA 21), symbolic analysis (ISSTA’20, OOPSLA’21, ASPLOS’24a, ASPLOS’25), and memory sanitization (ASPLOS’24b).

I am serving as the PC for CCS 2025, ISSTA 2025, as well as co-chairing SPLASH 2025. Look forward to seeing your submission!

NEWS!

  • Our study for Android APP token privacy issues has been accepted in EMSE 25!
  • Our extension paper on Android testing gets accepted in ICSE 25!
  • Entering the finale of DARPA AIxCC!
  • Our work on fuzzing Android applications gets accepted at TSE 2024!
  • One ASPLOS 2025 submission gets accepted!
  • Received ASPLOS 2024 Best Paper Award for GiantSan! Congratulations, Hao!
  • Two ASPLOS 2024 submissions get accepted!
  • Another directed fuzzing work has been accepted by S&P 2024 (again)!
  • Our multi-target directed fuzzing work has been accepted by S&P 2024!
  • Received Google Research Paper award for our directed fuzzer published in S&P 2022!
  • Received Huawei distinguished collaborator award on deploying Pangolin (S&P 2020)!

I am looking for multiple Ph.D. students and RAs. If you pursue making the program more secure and reliable, please feel free to send me an email.

Award

  • ACM SIGARCH Best Paper Award (ASPLOS), 2024
  • Google Research Paper Award, 2022
  • Huawei Distinguish Collaborator, 2021

Students

I am fortunate to work with the following students:

  • Shuo Yang (PhD, 2024)
  • Xiang Li (RA, 2024)

Publication

(* corresponding author)

EMSE’25

How Far are App Secrets from Being Stolen? A Case Study on Android (To appear)
Lili Wei, Heqing Huang, Shing-Chi Cheung, Kevin Li.
Empirical Software Engineering

ICSE’25

Mole: Efficient Crash Reproduction in Android Applications With Enforcing Necessary UI Events (To appear)
Maryam Masoudian, Heqing Huang*, Morteza Amini, Charles Zhang.
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Journal-First

ASPLOS’25

Manta: Hybrid-Sensitive Type Inference Toward Type-Assisted Bug Detection for Stripped Binaries (To appear)
Chengfeng Ye, Yuandao Cai, Anshunkang Zhou, Heqing Huang, Hao Ling, Charles Zhang.
ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

TSE’24

Mole: Efficient Crash Reproduction in Android Applications with Enforcing Necessary UI Events
Maryam Masoudian, Heqing Huang*, Morteza Amini, Charles Zhang.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

ASPLOS’24b

GIANTSAN: Efficient Memory Sanitization with Segment Folding [Artifacts]
Hao Ling, Heqing Huang*, Chengpeng Wang, Yuandao Cai, Charles Zhang.
ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
🏆 ACM SIGPLAN Best Paper Award

ASPLOS’24a

Plankton: Reconciling Binary Code and Debug Information
Anshunkang Zhou, Chengfeng Ye, Heqing Huang*, Yuandao Cai, Charles Zhang.
ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

S&P’24b

Everything is Good for Something: Counterexample-Guided Directed Fuzzing via Likely Invariant Inference
Heqing Huang, Anshunkang Zhou, Mathias Payer, Charles Zhang.
The 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

S&P’24a

Titan: Efficient Multi-target Directed Greybox Fuzzing
Heqing Huang, Peisen Yao, Hung-Chun Chiu, Yiyuan Guo, Charles Zhang.
The 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. [Artifacts]

TDSC’23

Balance Seed Scheduling via Monte Carlo Planning
Heqing Huang, Hung-Chun Chiu, Qingkai Shi, Peisen Yao, Charles Zhang.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. [Artifacts]

S&P’22

BEACON: Directed Grey-Box Fuzzing with Provable Path Pruning
Heqing Huang, Yiyuan Guo, Qingkai Shi, Peisen Yao, Rongxin Wu, Charles Zhang.
The 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. [Artifacts]
🏆 Google Research Paper Award

OOPSLA’21

Program Analysis via Efficient Symbolic Abstraction
Peisen Yao, Qingkai Shi, Heqing Huang, Charles Zhang.
The 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications

FSE’21

Skeletal Approximation Enumeration for SMT Solver Testing
Peisen Yao, Heqing Huang*, Wensheng Tang, Qingkai Shi, Rongxin Wu, Charles Zhang.
The 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

ISSTA’21

Fuzzing SMT Solvers via Two-Dimentional Input Space Exploration
Peisen Yao, Heqing Huang, Wensheng Tang, Qingkai Shi, Rongxin Wu, Charles Zhang.
The 30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.

S&P’20

Pangolin: Incremental Hybrid Fuzzing via Polyhedral Path Abstraction
Heqing Huang, Peisen Yao, Rongxin Wu, Qingkai Shi, Charles Zhang.
The 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

ISSTA’20

Fast Bit-Vector Satisfiability
Peisen Yao, Qingkai Shi, Heqing Huang, Charles Zhang.
The 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.

Academic Service

Chair

Committe and Reviewer

Sub-/Co-reviewer

Teaching Service

  • CS2311 - Computer Programming (2024 Fall)
  • CS3402 - Database System (2024 Spring)

Funding and Cooperation

Our work Pangolin published in S&P 2020 has been successfully deployed in the Huawei tool-chain and detected more than 1000+ crashes/bugs! We have thus received the Huawei Distinguish Collaborator 2021 award! This is also reported by HKUST CSE department!

Bugs Hunting

Our self-built fuzzing framework (Integration of S&P’20, 22, 24, TDSC’23) has discovered more than 1000 bugs in the widely-used commercial and open-source projects, with over 100 of them assigned with CVE IDs and over $10K bounties. A partial of vulnerabilities detected can be found here. We also list the bugs found specifically for SMT theorem provers here.

Miscs