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George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing faculty members made a significant impact at the 2025 USENIX Security Conference, in Seattle, including winning the Distinguished Artifact Award.
“Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges,” a paper by the Department of Computer Science’s PhD student Junming Chen, PhD candidate Xiaoyue Ma, and Lannan Luo and Qiang Zeng, both associate professors, won the prestigious Distinguished Artifact Award, which was granted to only six of the 2,385 submitted papers.
Their research demonstrated how to turn Bluetooth devices into a trackable "AirTags" without requiring root privileges. The research revealed a vulnerability in Apple's Find My Network that can leverage more than a billion active Apple devices as unwitting finders. The high-quality artifact with its complete documentation and practical implementation provides researchers with an invaluable toolkit for evaluating tracking vulnerabilities in crowd-sourced location networks. Their work was previously reported by the university and received media attention in various outlets.
USENIX Security is one of the country’s premier cybersecurity conferences, and this year received 2,385 paper submissions with a 17% acceptance rate. The following George Mason research papers were also accepted at USENIX this year.
Rowhammer-Based Trojan Injection: One Bit Flip Is Sufficient for Backdooring DNNs
Xiang Li, Ying Meng, Junming Chen, Lannan Luo, and Qiang Zeng, George Mason University
DISPATCH: Unraveling Security Patches from Entangled Code Changes
Shiyu Sun and Yunlong Xing, George Mason University; Xinda Wang, University of Texas at Dallas; Shu Wang, Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Qi Li, Tsinghua University; Kun Sun, George Mason University
TYPEPULSE: Detecting Type Confusion Bugs in Rust Programs
Hung-Mao Chen and Xu He, George Mason University; Shu Wang, George Mason University and Palo Alto Networks Inc.; Xiaokuan Zhang and Kun Sun, George Mason University
LLMmap: Fingerprinting for Large Language Models
Dario Pasquini, RSAC Labs; Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos and Giuseppe Ateniese, George Mason University