I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University, co-director of the Secure Computing Institute, director of the Wolfpack Security and Privacy Research (WSPR) laboratory, and a member of the Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2). I earned my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and 2006, respectively, and my B.S. in Computer Engineering from Penn State in 2004.
My research studies the security of a wide range of systems, including the software supply chain, 5G and cloud infrastructure, mobile platforms, Internet of Things (IoT), and networks. I commonly apply a range of systems design, program analysis, and empirical studies to demonstrate how novel techniques and tools can improve the security of our computing systems. (Short Bio)
Contact Information
Office: 2240M Engineering Building II
Phone: (919) 513-7905
Email: whenck at ncsu.edu
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Postal Mail
Department of Computer Science |
Deliveries
3320 Engineering Building II |
Current PhD Students
- Trevor Dunlap (expected 2025) [co-advised with Dr. Brad Reaves]
- Seaver Thorn (expected 2026)
- K. Virgil English (expected 2027)
- Elizabeth Lin (expected 2027)
- Greg Tystahl (expected 2027) [co-advised with Dr. Alexandros Kapravelos]
- Jonah Ghebremichael (expected 2028) [co-advised with Dr. Alexandros Kapravelos]
(all current and past students)
Recent Professional Activities
- Vice President, July 2024- USENIX Association Board of Directors
- Secretary, 2022-2024 USENIX Association Board of Directors
- Steering Committee, 2019-present USENIX Security Symposium
- Program Co-Chair, 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
- Program Co-Chair, 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
News
April 8, 2024: Our paper, Pairing Security Advisories with Vulnerable Functions Using Open-Source LLMs has been accepted for publication at the 2024 Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA).
March 28, 2024: I was elected as Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors.
March 23, 2024: Our paper, 5GAC-Analyzer: Identifying Over-Privilege Between 5G Core Network Functions has been accepted for publication at the 2024 ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec).
March 12, 2024: Our paper, VFCFinder: Pairing Security Advisories and Patches has been accepted for publication at the 2024 ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS).
February 29, 2024: We received a distinguished paper award at NDSS for our paper, UntrustIDE: Exploiting Weaknesses in VS Code Extensions.