Donpeng Xu's Home Page

I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Hampshire. My research interest is software security, especially program analysis on binary code, software obfuscation/de-obfuscation, malware analysis, program similarity analysis, and model checking. Before joining UNH, I obtained my Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University. I received my master's degree at University of Science and Technology of China and bachelor's degree at Jilin University.

I am on sabbatical leave now.

Office: 33 Academic Way N221A, Durham, NH 03824

E-mail: dongpeng.xu AT unh.edu

Selected Publications

[Full List,Google Scholar]

[SP '25] Inspecting Virtual Machine Diversification Inside Virtualization Obfuscation
Naiqian Zhang, Dongpeng Xu, Jiang Ming, Jun Xu, Qiaoyan Yu
The 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 12--15, 2025.

[DSN '23] No Free Lunch: On the Increased Code Reuse Attack Surface of Obfuscated Programs
Naiqian Zhang, Daroc Alden, Dongpeng Xu, Shuai Wang, Trent Jaeger, and Wheeler Ruml
The 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network, June 27--30, 2023. (Acceptance Rate: 47/233=20.2%)

[EMNLP '21] GraphMR: Graph Neural Network for Mathematical Reasoning
Weijie Feng, Binbin Liu, Dongpeng Xu, Qilong Zheng, Yun Xu
The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Virtual Event, November 7--11, 2021. (Acceptance Rate: 650/2540=25.6%)

[DSN '21] Towards Optimal Use of Exception Handling Information for Function Detection
Chengbin Pang, Ruotong Yu, Dongpeng Xu, Eric Koskinen, Georgios Portokalidis, and Jun Xu
The 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Virtual Event, June 21--24, 2021. (Acceptance Rate: 48/279=17.2%)

[USENIX Security '21] MBA-Blast: Unveiling and Simplifying Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Obfuscation
Binbin Liu, Junfu Shen, Jiang Ming, Qilong Zheng, Jing Li, and Dongpeng Xu
The 30th USENIX Security Symposium, Virtual Event, August 11--13, 2021. (Acceptance Rate: 246/1316=18.7%)

[PLDI '21] Boosting SMT Solver Performance on Mixed-Bitwise-Arithmetic Expressions
Dongpeng Xu, Binbin Liu, Weijie Feng, Jiang Ming, Jing Li, Qilong Zheng, and Qiaoyan Yu The 42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, Virtual Event, June 20--26, 2021. (Acceptance Rate: 87/319=27.2%)

[TDSC '20] Generating Effective Software Obfuscation Sequences with Reinforcement Learning
Huaijin Wang, Shuai Wang, Dongpeng Xu, Xiangyu Zhang, and Xiao Liu
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, December 2020.

[CCS '20] VAHunt: Warding Off New Repackaged Android Malware in App-Virtualization's Clothing
Luman Shi, Jiang Ming, Jianming Fu, Guojun Peng, Dongpeng Xu, Kun Gao, and Xuanchen Pan
The 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Event, November 10--12, 2020. (Acceptance Rate: 121/715=16.9%)

[ASP-DAC '20] Security Threats and Countermeasures for Approximate Arithmetic Computing
Pruthvy Yellu, Mohammad Mezanur Rahman Monjur, Timothy Kammerer, Dongpeng Xu, and Qiaoyan Yu
The 25th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, Beijing, China, January 13--16, 2020. (Acceptance Rate: 32.7%)

[CCS '18] VMHunt: A Verifiable Approach to Partially-Virtualized Binary Code Simplification
Dongpeng Xu, Jiang Ming, Yu Fu, and Dinghao Wu
The 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Toronto, Canada, October 15--19, 2018. (Acceptance Rate: 134/809=16.6%)

[USENIX Security '17] BinSim: Trace-based Semantic Binary Diffing via System Call Sliced Segment Equivalence Checking
Jiang Ming, Dongpeng Xu, Yufei Jiang, and Dinghao Wu
The 26th USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 16--18, 2017. (Acceptance Rate: 85/522=16.3%)

[SP '17] Cryptographic Function Detection in Obfuscated Binaries via Bit-precise Symbolic Loop Mapping
Dongpeng Xu, Jiang Ming, and Dinghao Wu
The 38th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Jose, CA, May 22--24, 2017. (Acceptance Rate: 60/457=13%)

[CCS '15] LOOP: Logic-Oriented Opaque Predicate Detection in Obfuscated Binary Code
Jiang Ming, Dongpeng Xu, Li Wang, and Dinghao Wu
The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Denver, Colorado, USA, October 12--16, 2015. (Acceptance Rate: 128/646=19.8%)

Teaching

CS 727/827 Software Security (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020)
CS 527 Fundamentals of Cybersecurity (Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021)
CS 927 Software Security Analysis (Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019)
CS 780/880 Computer Security (Spring 2019)
CS 980 Graduate Seminar: Cybersecurity (Fall 2018)