I‘m Yingao(Elaine) Yao, a CS PhD student at Cornell University advised by Saikat Dutta. I received my MASc in 2024 in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I worked with Karthik Pattabiraman and Caroline Lemieux. I received my B.Eng in 2021 from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Before PhD, I worked at Fortinet as a Security Researcher.
My research interests lie in developing software testing techniques (e.g., fuzzing) to improve the security, reliability, and correctness of software systems. My prior work is centered around applying fuzz testing to discover vulnerabilities in systems such as drone swarms (see SwarmFuzz) and CPUs.
Paper on SwarmFuzz, a fuzzer for finding vulnerabilities in drone swarms got accepted to DSN 2023.
Poster on the drone swarm security accepted to [ACM CCS 2022]（https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2022/）.