Nicolaas Weideman

Nicolaas is a PhD student of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering. He is currently working as a graduate research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, under supervision of Dr. Jelena Mirkovic and Dr. Christophe Hauser. His current research interests lay in computer security, specifically binary program analysis for automatic vulnerability detection and mitigation.

Projects

LEADER

Role: The LEADER project focuses on detecting and mitigating low-rate denial of service attacks. Attack detection is done at the operating system and network level, while attack mitigation is done at the application level. The role Nicolaas plays is in the attack mitigation subsection. The goal is to develop an analysis on the binary code instructions of an application that has succumbed to a low-rate denial of service attack. This is done in order to gain a deeper understanding of the vulnerability that exists therein. Properties of the vulnerability that are of interest include the type of low-rate denial of service attack that may be used in exploitation, as well as the location of the vulnerability. Knowing these properties may make it possible to fix the vulnerability at the binary level, without requiring access to the source code of the application.

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