Jared Chandler


I'm a PhD candidate at Tufts University working under the supervision of Dr. Kathleen Fisher. My research focuses on automatic protocol reverse engineering, network security, and cyber-deception. My work leverages artificial intelligence (AI), programming languages (PL), and machine learning (ML) to tackle difficult computer security problems. I also have an extensive background in visualization and data science.



Recent News

April 2024 I will be defending my PhD dissertation on April 19th! Contact for details.

February 2024 Delighted to give talks to IDA CCS and the US Government in the DC Area.

February 2024 Delighted to give a talk to the talented security researchers at Black Mesa.

January 2024 Invited Expert at the DARPA / ISAT FINDS Workshop in San Franciso.

October 2023 Presenting as part of DARPA Demo Day 2023 at The Pentagon.

July 2023 I will be co-teaching How Systems Work (CS202) this Fall at Tufts!

June 2023 Presenting as part of the Putting the Tech into Cybersecurity Workshop June 19-22 here at Tufts!

March 2023 Presented BinaryInferno at the 30th Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS).

March 2023 My work on keyword identification was voted best technical poster at the 30th Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS).

January 2023 I will be teaching a one-week Cybersecurity Fundamentals Intensive as part of the Fletcher Cyber-Security and Public Policy graduate program.



Publications

Binaryinferno: A semantic-driven approach to field inference for binary message formats.
Jared Chandler, Adam Wick, and Kathleen Fisher
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) 2023. (19% Acceptance Rate)
[ Paper ]

Synthesizing intrusion detection system test data from open- source attack signatures.
Jared Chandler and Adam Wick
IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (LANGSEC) 2023.
[ Paper ]

Deceptive self-attack for cyber-defense.
Jared Chandler and Adam Wick
56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2023.
[ Paper ]

Automatic discovery and synthesis of checksum algorithms from binary data samples.
Lauren Labell*, Jared Chandler, and Kathleen Fisher.
15th Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS) 2020.
[ Paper ]

Invasion of the botnet snatchers: A case study in applied malware cyberdeception.
Jared Chandler, Kathleen Fisher, Erin Chapman, Eric Davis, and Adam Wick.
53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2020.
[ Paper ]



Current Research Projects

Automatic Protocol Reverse Engineering
I am currently exanding my approaches to automatic protocol reverse engineering. My goal is a fully automated approach to infering semantic descriptions using only passively collected network traces. This work is valuable for identifying security vulnerabilities in proprietary and adversary systems, for uncovering the specifications of legacy equipment, and for validating that an on-the-wire format is faithful to a given specification.
[ Stage: Theory » System » Experiment » Paper ]


Botnet Scanning Countermeasures
I currently exploring network counter-measures to delay, deter, and defeat scanning by malicious botnets. Described succinctly as "Anti-Botnet Network Landmines".
[ Stage: Theory » System » Experiment ]


Usable Tools for Protocol Reverse Engineering
I am developing user-facing tools to assist reverse engineers with analyzing unknown protocol data. While tools such as GHIDRA and IDA Pro exist for reverse engineering binary executables, specialized tools for binary protocols do not currently exist.
[ Stage: Theory » System ]


Synthesizing Network Attack Traffic
I am actively exanding my approaches for generating synthetic network attack traffic. This line of research builds on my earlier work leveraging intrusion detection system (IDS) rules as a cook-book for creating look-alike traffic.
[ Stage: Theory » System ]




Honors

NDSS Best Technical Poster
2023, Voted best technical poster at 30th Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) [ Poster ]

Nominated as a DARPA Forward Riser
2022, Nominated as a DARPA Forward Riser at DARPA Forward Texas A & M.



Visualizations

While my current work is focused on applied research for computer security, I have an extensive background in visualization, design, human computer interfaces (HCI) and user-interfaces (UX). Below are a few examples.


Parallel coordinates interface with adjustable error bounds.


Scalable squarified treemaps for reasoning about file permissions.


Interactive SQL query visualization.


3D printed tangible grammars.