Researcher profile

Deqing Zou

Deqing Zou contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Towards Security-Auditable LLM Agents: A Unified Graph Representation

LLM-based agentic systems are rapidly evolving to perform complex autonomous tasks through dynamic tool invocation, stateful memory management, and multi-agent collaboration. However, this semantics-driven execution paradigm creates a severe semantic gap between low-level physical events and high-level execution intent, making post-hoc security auditing fundamentally difficult. Existing representation mechanisms, including static SBOMs and runtime logs, provide only fragmented evidence and fail to capture cognitive-state evolution, capability bindings, persistent memory contamination, and cascading risk propagation across interacting agents. To bridge this gap, we propose Agent-BOM, a unified structural representation for agent security auditing. Agent-BOM models an agentic system as a hierarchical attributed directed graph that separates static capability bases, such as models, tools, and long-term memory, from dynamic runtime semantic states, such as goals, reasoning trajectories, and actions. These layers are connected through semantic edges and security attributes, transforming fragmented execution traces into queryable audit paths. Building on Agent-BOM, we develop a graph-query-based paradigm for path-level risk assessment and instantiate it with the OWASP Agentic Top 10. We further implement an auditing plugin in the OpenClaw environment to construct Agent-BOM from live executions. Evaluation on representative real-world agentic attack scenarios shows that Agent-BOM can reconstruct stealthy attack chains, including cross-session memory poisoning and tool misuse, capability supply-chain hijacking and unexpected code execution, multi-agent ecosystem hijacking, and privilege and trust abuse. These results demonstrate that Agent-BOM provides a unified and auditable foundation for root-cause analysis and security adjudication in complex agentic ecosystems.

preprint2021arXiv

SySeVR: A Framework for Using Deep Learning to Detect Software Vulnerabilities

The detection of software vulnerabilities (or vulnerabilities for short) is an important problem that has yet to be tackled, as manifested by the many vulnerabilities reported on a daily basis. This calls for machine learning methods for vulnerability detection. Deep learning is attractive for this purpose because it alleviates the requirement to manually define features. Despite the tremendous success of deep learning in other application domains, its applicability to vulnerability detection is not systematically understood. In order to fill this void, we propose the first systematic framework for using deep learning to detect vulnerabilities in C/C++ programs with source code. The framework, dubbed Syntax-based, Semantics-based, and Vector Representations (SySeVR), focuses on obtaining program representations that can accommodate syntax and semantic information pertinent to vulnerabilities. Our experiments with 4 software products demonstrate the usefulness of the framework: we detect 15 vulnerabilities that are not reported in the National Vulnerability Database. Among these 15 vulnerabilities, 7 are unknown and have been reported to the vendors, and the other 8 have been "silently" patched by the vendors when releasing newer versions of the pertinent software products.

preprint2020arXiv

$μ$VulDeePecker: A Deep Learning-Based System for Multiclass Vulnerability Detection

Fine-grained software vulnerability detection is an important and challenging problem. Ideally, a detection system (or detector) not only should be able to detect whether or not a program contains vulnerabilities, but also should be able to pinpoint the type of a vulnerability in question. Existing vulnerability detection methods based on deep learning can detect the presence of vulnerabilities (i.e., addressing the binary classification or detection problem), but cannot pinpoint types of vulnerabilities (i.e., incapable of addressing multiclass classification). In this paper, we propose the first deep learning-based system for multiclass vulnerability detection, dubbed $μ$VulDeePecker. The key insight underlying $μ$VulDeePecker is the concept of code attention, which can capture information that can help pinpoint types of vulnerabilities, even when the samples are small. For this purpose, we create a dataset from scratch and use it to evaluate the effectiveness of $μ$VulDeePecker. Experimental results show that $μ$VulDeePecker is effective for multiclass vulnerability detection and that accommodating control-dependence (other than data-dependence) can lead to higher detection capabilities.