CV

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Education

• 2024 - PhD, CybersecurityKhoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University · Advisor: Ziming Zhao
• 2024 MS, Computer ScienceState University of New York at Buffalo · Thesis: control-flow integrity in ARM Cortex-M MCUs

Research experience

• 2024 - Graduate Researcher, CACTI LabNortheastern University · Embedded systems security, fuzzing, reverse engineering
• ARPA-H UPGRADE Project
• NPU Reversing on Production Devices
• Embedded System Security
• TV Hacking

Publications

Xi Tan, Sagar Mohan, Md Armanuzzaman, Zheyuan Ma, Gaoxiang Liu, Alex Eastman, Hongxin Hu, and Ziming Zhao. Is the Canary Dead? On the Effectiveness of Stack Canaries on Microcontroller Systems. ACM SAC '24, 2024. [pdf] [slides] [bib] [doi]

Talks

• Apr 2026 Grey-box firmware fuzzing of IoT peripheralsTalk · Khoury Security Research Day

Teaching

• Spring 2025 Software Vulnerabilities and Security (CY 5770)Teaching Assistant · Northeastern University

Service

• Mar 2026 Reviewer -- IEEE S&P 2026 Poster Session
• Dec 2024 - Apr 2025 Technical Committee for C2C CTF 2025Engineered the CTF platform and created challenges in Binary, OSINT, and Reversing.

Awards

• Nov 2024 Global Learner Award -- Khoury College