About Me

I am a first year Ph.D. student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in program analysis, security, and software engineering. Broadly, I am also interested in program synthesis and augmenting program analysis, compilers, and reverse-engineering with ideas from NLP and machine learning.

In 2019, I got my Masters’ from Purdue University, where I worked with Prof. Mathias Payer on binary analysis, static binary rewriting, and their applications to secure commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) and legacy binaries. In Summer 2018, I interned at GrammaTech Inc. with Dr. Vineeth Kashyap where I worked at the intersection of binary analysis and machine learning to identify known components, e.g., libraries, in binaries of unknown provenance. I obtained my Bachelors’ degree in 2016 from National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.

You can reach me at: sushant.dinesh94 at gmail.com

Publications

2020

Sushant Dinesh, Nathan Burow, Dongyan Xu, and Mathias Payer. “RetroWrite: Statically Instrumenting COTS Binaries for Fuzzing and Sanitization”. In: IEEE International Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2020, (To Appear). (paper) (code)

Other Interests

Apart from research:

• I enjoy security capture-the-flag competitions (CTFs) especially reverse-engineering and exploitation,
• Music: I play guitar and enjoy prog music,
• Computer Games: I’ve played Dota2 from a long time, more recently I enjoy roguelike games.