Hi there 👋

I am an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University (NAU)  in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS). My research focuses on cybersecurity, with a specific emphasis on leveraging AI to address critical challenges. I aim to automate threat detection, enhance cyber analysis, and strengthen the efficiency and resilience of our digital ecosystems.

I am currently seeking highly motivated Ph.D. students who are interested in various areas of cybersecurity, including but not limited to:

• Adversarial machine learning and countermeasures

• Network and system security

• Secure software development and code analysis

• Cryptography and data privacy

• IoT and mobile security

If you are interested, please send me your CV, transcript(s), GRE scores, TOEFL scores (for international applicants), and any sample publications you may have at lan.zhang@nau.edu.

Publications:

• What Your Firmware Tells You Is Not How You Should Emulate It: A Specification-Guided Approach for Firmware Emulation
  Lan Zhang, Wei Zhou, Le Guan, Liu Peng, and Yuqing Zhang, " What Your Firmware Tells You Is Not How You Should Emulate It: A Specification-Guided Approach for Firmware Emulation ", accepted by the 29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

• Semantics-preserving Reinforcement Learning Attack Against Graph Neural Networks for Malware Detection
  L. Zhang, P. Liu, Y. Choi and P. Chen, " Semantics-preserving Reinforcement Learning Attack Against Graph Neural Networks for Malware Detection", in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2022.3153844.

• Randomized bit vector: Privacy-preserving encoding mechanism
  Lin Sun, Lan Zhang, and Xiaojun Ye. 2018. Randomized Bit Vector: Privacy-Preserving Encoding Mechanism. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1263–1272. https://doi.org/10.1145/3269206.3271703

• Using deep learning to solve computer security challenges: a survey
  Choi, YH., Liu, P., Shang, Z. et al. Using deep learning to solve computer security challenges: a survey. Cybersecur 3, 15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-020-00055-5

• Reviewing IoT security via logic bugs in IoT platforms and systems
  W. Zhou et al., "Reviewing IoT Security via Logic Bugs in IoT Platforms and Systems," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 8, no. 14, pp. 11621-11639, 15 July15, 2021, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3059457.

Check out my google scholar.