Mu Zhang

Mu Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah. His research focuses on computer security, particularly developing tools using program analysis, machine learning, and data mining to address security issues in Web3, cyber-physical systems, and mobile systems. Previously, he was a Postdoc at Cornell University and a Research Staff Member at NEC Labs America.

Education and Background:

• Postdoc, Cornell University
• Research Staff Member, NEC Labs America

Research Interests: His work emphasizes automated detection and mitigation of security vulnerabilities, including smart contract flaws, industrial control system threats, and malware analysis. He explores innovative solutions like ICSTracker for intrusion backtracking and DEEPVMUNPROTECT for VM-protected Android malware recovery. Recent efforts span blockchain formal verification, Wasm runtime testing, and cross-domain threat inference.

Recent Contributions: Notable publications include papers on provenance analysis for industrial control systems (DSN'25), storage collision mitigation in smart contracts (USENIX Sec'25), and automated generation of security-centric smart contract descriptions (ISSTA'23, distinguished paper). Funded projects include NSF grants for AI security education and Cisco Research for smart contract semantics recovery.

Awards: His team received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (2023) and CCS 2022 Best Paper Honorable Mention.

Advising and Grants: Supervises PhD/MSc students like Yu, Wanjing, and Taiji. Active in proposal funding (e.g., Idaho National Lab for industrial control systems, Stellar Foundation for smart contract analysis). Served on TPCs for NDSS, CCS, and ISSTA.

Labs/Teams: Leads a research group at University of Utah focusing on secure software systems and automated security tool development.