VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Cornelius Aschermann
dblp:160/7844
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18ranked-venue papers
3as first author
3since 2021 · last 2022
0009-0000-1650-6872ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 12 · 3 first-author · 2 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1Theory of computation · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Nyx-net: network fuzzing with incremental snapshotsabstractCoverage-guided fuzz testing ("fuzzing") has become mainstream and we have observed lots of progress in this research area recently. However, it is still challenging to efficiently test network services with existing coverage-guided fuzzing methods. In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of Nyx-Net, a novel snapshot-based fuzzing approach that can successfully fuzz a wide range of targets spanning servers, clients, games, and even Firefox's Inter-Process Communication (IPC) interface. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, Nyx-Net improves test throughput by up to 300x and coverage found by up to 70%. Additionally, Nyx-Net is able to find crashes in two of ProFuzzBench's targets that no other fuzzer found previously. When using Nyx-Net to play the game Super Mario, Nyx-Net shows speedups of 10--30x compared to existing work. Moreover, Nyx-Net is able to find previously unknown bugs in servers such as Lighttpd, clients such as MySQL client, and even Firefox's IPC mechanism---demonstrating the strength and versatility of the proposed approach. Lastly, our prototype implementation was awarded a $20.000 bug bounty for enabling fuzzing on previously unfuzzable code in Firefox and solving a long-standing problem at Mozilla. Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Andrea Jemmett, Ali Abbasi 0002, Thorsten Holz |
EuroSys | 2 |
| 2022 | Loki: Hardening Code Obfuscation Against Automated Attacks
Moritz Schloegel, Tim Blazytko, Moritz Contag, Cornelius Aschermann, Julius Basler, Thorsten Holz, Ali Abbasi 0002 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 4 |
| 2021 | Nyx: Greybox Hypervisor Fuzzing using Fast Snapshots and Affine Types
Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Ali Abbasi 0002, Simon Wörner, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2020 | HYPER-CUBE: High-Dimensional Hypervisor Fuzzing
Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Ali Abbasi 0002, Simon Wörner, Thorsten Holz |
NDSS | 2 |
| 2020 | Ijon: Exploring Deep State Spaces via FuzzingabstractAlthough current fuzz testing (fuzzing) methods are highly effective, there are still many situations such as complex state machines where fully automated approaches fail. State-of-the-art fuzzing methods offer very limited ability for a human to interact and aid the fuzzer in such cases. More specifically, most current approaches are limited to adding a dictionary or new seed inputs to guide the fuzzer. When dealing with complex programs, these mechanisms are unable to uncover new parts of the code base.In this paper, we propose Ijon, an annotation mechanism that a human analyst can use to guide the fuzzer. In contrast to the two aforementioned techniques, this approach allows a more systematic exploration of the program's behavior based on the data representing the internal state of the program. As a consequence, using only a small (usually one line) annotation, a user can help the fuzzer to solve previously unsolvable challenges. We extended various AFL-based fuzzers with the ability to annotate the source code of the target application with guidance hints. Our evaluation demonstrates that such simple annotations are able to solve problems that-to the best of our knowledge- no other current fuzzer or symbolic execution based tool can overcome. For example, with our extension, a fuzzer is able to play and solve games such as Super Mario Bros. or resolve more complex patterns such as hash map lookups. To further demonstrate the capabilities of our annotations, we use AFL combined with Ijon to uncover both novel security issues and issues that previously required a custom and comprehensive grammar to be uncovered. Lastly, we show that using Ijon and AFL, one can solve many challenges from the CGC data set that resisted all fully automated and human guided attempts so far. Cornelius Aschermann, Sergej Schumilo, Ali Abbasi 0002, Thorsten Holz |
SP | 1 |
| 2020 | AURORA: Statistical Crash Analysis for Automated Root Cause Explanation
Tim Blazytko, Moritz Schloegel, Cornelius Aschermann, Ali Abbasi 0002, Joel Frank, Simon Wörner, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 3 |
| 2020 | ETHBMC: A Bounded Model Checker for Smart Contracts
Joel Frank, Cornelius Aschermann, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2019 | NAUTILUS: Fishing for Deep Bugs with Grammars
Cornelius Aschermann, Tommaso Frassetto, Thorsten Holz, Patrick Jauernig, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Daniel Teuchert |
NDSS | 1 |
| 2019 | REDQUEEN: Fuzzing with Input-to-State Correspondence
Cornelius Aschermann, Sergej Schumilo, Tim Blazytko, Robert Gawlik, Thorsten Holz |
NDSS | 1 |
| 2019 | GRIMOIRE: Synthesizing Structure while Fuzzing
Tim Blazytko, Cornelius Aschermann, Moritz Schloegel, Ali Abbasi 0002, Sergej Schumilo, Simon Wörner, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2019 | AntiFuzz: Impeding Fuzzing Audits of Binary Executables
Emre Güler, Cornelius Aschermann, Ali Abbasi 0002, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2017 | Syntia: Synthesizing the Semantics of Obfuscated Code
Tim Blazytko, Moritz Contag, Cornelius Aschermann, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 3 |
| 2017 | kAFL: Hardware-Assisted Feedback Fuzzing for OS Kernels
Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Robert Gawlik, Sebastian Schinzel, Thorsten Holz |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2017 | Lower Bounds for Runtime Complexity of Term Rewriting
Florian Frohn, Jürgen Giesl, Jera Hensel, Cornelius Aschermann, Thomas Ströder |
J. Autom. Reason. | 4 |
| 2017 | Analyzing Program Termination and Complexity Automatically with AProVE
Jürgen Giesl, Cornelius Aschermann, Marc Brockschmidt, Fabian Emmes, Florian Frohn, Carsten Fuhs, Jera Hensel, Carsten Otto, Martin Plücker, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Thomas Ströder, Stephanie Swiderski, René Thiemann |
J. Autom. Reason. | 2 |
| 2017 | Automatically Proving Termination and Memory Safety for Programs with Pointer Arithmetic
Thomas Ströder, Jürgen Giesl, Marc Brockschmidt, Florian Frohn, Carsten Fuhs, Jera Hensel, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Cornelius Aschermann |
J. Autom. Reason. | 8 |
| 2015 | Inferring Lower Bounds for Runtime ComplexityabstractWe present the first approach to deduce lower bounds for innermost runtime complexity of term rewrite systems (TRSs) automatically. Inferring lower runtime bounds is useful to detect bugs and to complement existing techniques that compute upper complexity bounds. The key idea of our approach is to generate suitable families of rewrite sequences of a TRS and to find a relation between the length of such a rewrite sequence and the size of the first term in the sequence. We implemented our approach in the tool AProVE and evaluated it by extensive experiments. Florian Frohn, Jürgen Giesl, Jera Hensel, Cornelius Aschermann, Thomas Ströder |
RTA | 4 |
| 2015 | AProVE: Termination and Memory Safety of C Programs - (Competition Contribution)
Thomas Ströder, Cornelius Aschermann, Florian Frohn, Jera Hensel, Jürgen Giesl |
TACAS | 2 |