VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Nirav Diwan
dblp:263/9750
· DBLP profile ↗
4ranked-venue papers
0as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 2 · 2 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | PurpCode: Reasoning for Safer Code GenerationabstractWe introduce PurpCode, the first post-training recipe for training safe code reasoning models towards generating secure code and defending against malicious cyberactivities. PurpCode trains a reasoning model in two stages: (i) Rule Learning, which
explicitly teaches the model to reference cybersafety rules to generate vulnerability-free code and to avoid facilitating malicious cyberactivities; and (ii) Reinforcement Learning, which optimizes model safety and preserves model utility through diverse, multi-objective reward mechanisms. To empower the training pipelines with comprehensive cybersafety data, we conduct internal red-teaming to synthesize comprehensive and high-coverage prompts based on real-world tasks for inducing unsafe cyberactivities in the model. Based on PurpCode, we develop a reasoning-based coding model, namely PurpCode-32B, which demonstrates state-of-the-art cybersafety,
outperforming various frontier models. Moreover, our alignment method decreases the model overrefusal rates in both general and cybersafety-specific scenarios, while preserving model utility in both code generation and common security knowledge. Jiawei Liu 0004, Nirav Diwan, Haoyu Zhai, Xiaona Zhou, Kiet A. Nguyen, Tianjiao Yu, Muntasir Wahed, Yinlin Deng, Hadjer Benkraouda, Yuxiang Wei 0003, Lingming Zhang 0001, Ismini Lourentzou, Gang Wang 0011 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | You Can't Judge a Binary by Its Header: Data-Code Separation for Non-Standard ARM Binaries Using Pseudo LabelsabstractStatic binary analysis is critical to various security tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware detection. In recent years, binary analysis has faced new challenges as vendors of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) continue to introduce customized or non-standard binary formats that existing tools cannot readily process. Reverse-engineering each of the new formats is costly as it requires extensive expertise and analysts' time. In this paper, we investigate the first step to automate the analysis of non-standard binaries, which is to recognize the bytes representing “code” from “data” (i.e., data-code separation). We propose Loadstar, and its key idea is to use the abundant labeled data from standard binaries to train a classifier and adapt it for processing unlabeled non-standard binaries. We use a pseudo-label-based method for domain adaption and leverage knowledge-inspired rules for pseudo-label correction, which serves as the guardrail for the adaption process. A key advantage of the system is that it does not require labeling any non-standard binaries. Using three datasets of non-standard PLC binaries, we evaluate Loadstar and show it outperforms existing tools in terms of both accuracy and processing speed. We will share the tool (open source) with the community. Hadjer Benkraouda, Nirav Diwan, Gang Wang 0011 |
SP | 2 |
| 2024 | It Doesn't Look Like Anything to Me: Using Diffusion Model to Subvert Visual Phishing Detectors
Qingying Hao, Nirav Diwan, Ying Yuan 0002, Giovanni Apruzzese, Mauro Conti, Gang Wang 0011 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2022 | Weakening the Inner Strength: Spotting Core Collusive Users in YouTube Blackmarket Network
Hridoy Sankar Dutta, Nirav Diwan, Tanmoy Chakraborty 0002 |
ICWSM | 2 |