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Daniel Kang

Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Daniel Zion Kang is a highly qualified individual with a strong educational background in Computer Science. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following his undergraduate studies, Daniel pursued further education and completed a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science at Stanford University. Additionally, he also earned a Master's Degree in Tripos Part III from the University of Cambridge.

Highlights

Aug 12 · linkedin

I'll be speaking at the GenAI collective in NYC this Wednesday! Come hear me speak about cybersecurity and AI agents: https://lnkd.in/e9W_h5tp

Jun 5 · linkedin

OpenAI claimed in their GPT-4 system card that it isn't effective at finding novel vulnerabilities.

We show this is false. AI agents can autonomously find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.

Zero-day vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous since they aren’t known ahead of time. They’re also challenging since the agent doesn’t know what to exploit. Our prior work on agents gets confused when switching tasks in the zero-day setting.

To resolve this, we introduce a new technique HPTSA, hierarchical planning and task-specific agents. The planner explores the website and dispatches to other agents that perform the exploit. HPTSA can hack over half of the vulnerabilities in our benchmark, compared to 0% for open-source vulnerability scanners and 20% for our previous agents.

Our results show that testing LLMs in the chatbot setting, as the original GPT-4 safety assessment did, is insufficient for understanding LLM capabilities. We anticipate that other models, like Claude-3 Opus and Gemini-1.5 Pro will be similarly capable but were unable to test at the time of writing.

Paper: https://lnkd.in/ecRUthcM Medium: https://lnkd.in/euZCPssz

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Daniel Kang
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Experience

Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since September 2022
Graduate Research Assistant at Stanford University, September 2016 - September 2022, Software Engineering Intern at Dropbox, Apple, and Google; Intern at Naval Research Laboratory

Education

BS in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011 - 2015; Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, 2016 - 2021; Master’s Degree in Tripos Part III from University of C

Location

Santa Clara, California, United States