I am Xiang Mei (n132), a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, working with Dr. Yan Shoshitaishvili (advisor), Dr. Ruoyu (Fish) Wang, Dr. Adam Doupé, and Dr. Tiffany Bao in the SEFCOM lab. My research primarily revolves around automated binary analysis, vulnerability discovery, and exploitation. Prior to my doctoral studies, I earned my Master’s degree from NYU in 2023, where I conducted research (ARVO) with Dr. Brendan Dolan-Gavitt.
Since my sophomore year, I have been actively engaged in Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions. I compete as part of Shellphish and r3kapig teams under the handle n132, specializing in binary exploitation (PWN). Recently, I became the tenth person to solve all challenges on Pwnable.tw, a journey that spanned seven years and built my exploitation skills. Moreover, I have been a DEF CON CTF finalist between 2021-2026. During my master’s study at NYU, I served as the Lab Manager for NYU Osiris Lab, organizing CSAW-CTFs in 2021 and 2022. I also participated in bug bounty programs to tackle real-world security challenges, such as the Linux kernel in Google’s kernelCTF, and WYZE-V3 camera at PWN2OWN Toronto.
I like open-source, contributing to major projects like the Linux kernel and oss-fuzz. I share various exploitation tools and techniques I develop on my GitHub, including Libc-GOT-Hijacking, Dec-Safe-Linking, BeapOverflow, and more.
News
| Aug 2026 | Finished Internship at Microsoft (MSR, MDASH) |
|---|---|
| Jul 2026 | ARVO got Distinguished Paper Award on Euro S&P |
| Mar 2026 | KernelCTF: Exploited Linux kernel v6.12.74 |
| Mar 2026 | Our paper, ARVO, got accepted in Euro S&P 2026 |
| Aug 2025 | Shellphish got 5th in AIxCC Final Event |
| Jun 2025 | KernelCTF: Exploited Linux kernel v6.6.95 |
Papers
Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO’s influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.


