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Faculty Portrait

Contact Information

Name: Xiaoyan (Sherry) Sun

Title: Assistant Professor

Office Location: RVR 5050

Office Phone: (916) 278-6946

About

I am currently an assistant professor with Department of Computer Science in College of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Sacramento. I received my Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from the Pennsylvania State University. My advisor is Dr. Peng Liu. I got my Master's Degree in Information Science and Technology from University of Science and Technology of China in 2010, and my Bachelor's Degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from Shandong Normal University in 2007.

My current research covers several areas of cyber security, including enterprise-level network and distributed system security, cloud security, and cyber situational awareness, etc. The involved subjects include operating system level information flow tracking, vulnerability analysis and intrusion detection, probabilistic uncertainty analysis, and cyber situation knowledge integration, and so on.

Based on my background in electrical engineering and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), I am also interested in the security of cyber physical systems, Internet of Things, and other related areas such as inter-vehicle communication (IVC) networks.

Courses That I Teach

  • CSC 134 - Database Management Systems 
  • CSC 138 - Computer Network+Internet
  • CSC 153 - Comp Forensics Princ & Pract
  • CSC 253 - Computer Forensics

Research Projects/Interests

Cyber Security Research Projects

 

Publications


  • Xiaoyan Sun, Peng Liu, Anoop Singhal, “Towards Cyber Resilience in the Context of Cloud Computing”, IEEE Security &Privacy Magazine. 2019.
  • Pranavi Appana, Xiaoyan Sun, Yuan Cheng, “What To Do First: Ranking the Mission Imact Graph for Effective Mission Assurance,” International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2019). 2019.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Peng Liu, Anoop Singhal, John Yen, “Using Bayesian Networks for Probabilistic Identification of Zero-day Attack Paths”. Journal paper, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), Oct 2018.
  • Yulong Dong, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, “A Mobile Botnet that Meets Up at Twitter”, 14th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2018), Aug 2018.
  • Chen Cao, Lun-Pin Yuan, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, Xiaoyan Sun, Sencun Zhu, “Assessing Attack Impact on Business Processes by Interconnecting Attack Graphs and Entity Dependency Graphs”, 32nd Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec’18), Jul 2018.
  • Swarna Gopalan, Aditi Kulkarni, Arpitaben Narendrabhai Shah, Jun Dai, Jinsong Ouyang, Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik and Xiaoyan Sun, “Don’t Be Surprised: I See Your Mobile App Stealing Your Data”, International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2018), Mar 2018.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, “Probabilistic Inference of the Stealthy Bridges between Enterprise Networks in Cloud”, EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety, Journal paper, Jan 2018.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Peng Liu, Anoop Singhal, John Yen, “Using Bayesian Networks to Fuse Intrusion Evidences and Detect Zero-day Attack Paths”, Springer LNCS volume “Network Security Metrics and Applications”, Book chapter, Nov 2017.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, “Towards Actionable Mission Impact Assessment in the Context of Cloud Computing”, 31st Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec’17), Philadelphia, PA USA, 2017.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, “Enterprise Cyber Situation Awareness”, In P. Liu, S. Jajodia, and C. Wang (Eds.), in Theory and Models for Cyber Situation Awareness, Springer. Book Chapter, 2017
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Peng Liu, Anoop Singhal, John Yen, “Towards Probabilistic Identification of Zero-day Attack Paths”, IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2016), Philadelphia, PA USA, 2016 (Best Paper Runner-Up Award).
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, “Who Touched My Mission: Towards Probabilistic Mission Impact Assessment”, SafeConfig: Automated Decision Making for Active Cyber Defense (Collocated with ACM CCS 2015), Denver, Colorado, USA, 2015.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Anoop Singhal, Peng Liu, “Inferring the Stealthy Bridges between Enterprise Network Islands in Cloud Using Cross-Layer Bayesian Networks”, 10th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), Beijing, China, 2014 (Best Paper Award Nomination).
  • Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Peng Liu, “Patrol: Revealing Zero-day Attack Paths through Network-wide System Object Dependencies”, 18th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), RHUL, Egham, U.K., 2013 (Acceptance ratio: 17.8%).
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Jun Dai, Peng Liu,“SKRM: Where Techniques Talk to Each Other”, IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), San Diego, USA, 2013. Short Paper.
  • Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Peng Liu, Nicklaus Giacobe, “Gaining Big Picture Awareness through an Interconnected Cross-layer Situation Knowledge Reference Model”, 2012 ASE International Conference on Cyber Security, Washington DC, USA, 2012 (Acceptance ratio: 9.6%).
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Yuanlv Bao, Jun Dai, Wei Lu, Zhe Wang, “Performance Analysis of Inter-vehicle Communications in Multilane Dynamic Traffic Streams”, IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Tokyo, Japan, 2009.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Yuanlv Bao, Wei Lu, Jun Dai, Zhe Wang, “A Study on Performance of Inter-Vehicle Communications in Bidirectional Traffic Streams”, International Conference on Future Networks (ICFN), Sanya, China, 2010.
  • Wei Lu, Yuanlv Bao, Xiaoyan Sun, Zhe Wang, “Performance Evaluation of Inter-vehicle Communication in a Unidirectional Dynamic Traffic Flow with Shockwave”, International Workshop on Communication Technologies for Vehicles, Oct 2009.
  • Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Huang, “Class Teaching of Electronic Circuits Based on Multisim”, Modern Electronics Technique, Issue 24, 2006. Journal Paper. In Chinese.
  • Yanjun Liu, Zhen’an Liu, Xiaoyan Sun, “C Programming Language Practice Tutorial”, China Machine Press. ISBN: 7111250532, 9787111250531 2009. Book. In Chinese.