Bio

Ph.D. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2021B.S. Lahore University of Management Sciences, 2015

 

Research interests include:

Data Provenance, System Auditing, Threat Detection, and Forensic Analysis

 

 

Wajih Ul Hassan is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, starting in Fall 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021. His research focuses on securing complex networked systems by leveraging data provenance approaches and scalable system design. He has collaborated with NEC Labs and Symantec Research Labs to integrate his defensive techniques into commercial security products. He received a Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship, a Young Researcher in Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an RSA Security Scholarship, a Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship, a Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship, and an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

Awards

  • Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher 2020
  • ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award 2016

Research Interests

  • Data Provenance
  • System Auditing
  • Threat Detection
  • Forensic Analysis

Selected Publications

  • This is Why We Can’t Cache Nice Things: Lightning-Fast Threat Hunting using Suspicion-Based Hierarchical Storage Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2020; Wajih Ul Hassan, Ding Li, Kangkook Jee, Xiao Yu, Kexuan Zou, Dawei Wang, Zhengzhang Chen, Zhichun Li, Junghwan Rhee, Jiaping Gui, Adam Bates
  • On the Forensic Validity of Approximated Audit Logs Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2020; Noor Michael, Jaron Mink, Jason Liu, Sneha Gaur, Wajih Ul Hassan, Adam Bates
  • Tactical Provenance Analysis for Endpoint Detection and Response Systems IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2020; Wajih Ul Hassan, Adam Bates, Daniel Marino
  • OmegaLog: High-Fidelity Attack Investigation via Transparent Multi-layer Log Analysis Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2020; Wajih Ul Hassan, Mohammad Ali Noureddine, Pubali Datta, Adam Bates
  • Custos: Practical Tamper-Evident Auditing of Operating Systems Using Trusted Execution Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2020; Riccardo Paccagnella, Pubali Datta, Wajih Ul Hassan, Adam Bates, Christopher Fletcher, Andrew Miller, Dave Tian
  • You Are What You Do: Hunting Stealthy Malware via Data Provenance Analysis Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2020; Qi Wang, Wajih Ul Hassan, Ding Li, Kangkook Jee, Xiao Yu, Kexuan Zou, Junghwan Rhee, Zhengzhang Chen, Wei Cheng, Carl A. Gunter, Haifeng Chen.
  • NoDoze: Combatting Threat Alert Fatigue with Automated Provenance Triage Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2019; Wajih Ul Hassan, Shengjian Guo, Ding Li, Zhengzhang Chen, Kangkook Jee, Zhichun Li, Adam Bates
  • Analysis of Privacy Protections in Fitness Tracking Social Networks -or- You can run, but can you hide? USENIX Security 2018; Wajih Ul Hassan*, Saad Hussain*, Adam Bates (*denotes equal contribution)
  • Towards Scalable Cluster Auditing through Grammatical Inference over Provenance Graphs Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2018; Wajih Ul Hassan, Mark Lemay, Nuraini Aguse, Adam Bates, Thomas Moyer
  • Fear and Logging in the Internet of Things Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2018; Qi Wang, Wajih Ul Hassan, Adam Bates, Carl Gunter
  • Don't cry over spilled records: Memory elasticity of data-parallel applications and its application to cluster scheduling USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) 2017; Calin Iorgulescu, Florin Dinu, Aunn Raza, Wajih Ul Hassan, Willy Zwaenepoel
  • Transparent Web Service Auditing via Network Provenance Functions World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 2017; Adam Bates, Wajih Ul Hassan, Kevin Butler, Alin Dobra, Brad Reaves, Patrick Cable, Thomas Moyer, Nabil Schear
  • How Good are the Specs? A Study of the Bug-Finding Effectiveness of Existing Java API Specifications IEEE/ACM Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2016; Owolabi Legunsen, Wajih Ul Hassan, Xinyue Xu, Grigore Rosu, Darko Marinov
Google Scholar

Courses Taught

  • CS370: Operating Systems Fall 2021 (LUMS, Pakistan)