Engineer · Scientist · Hacker · Photographer

Steven Craig Hanna, PhD

perpetually perpetuating

Currently at Ex Nihilo Arcanum Capital. I like engineering, I like security, and I usually engineer security-related products.

About

Security, systems, and markets

I’m a computer security researcher, systems engineer, technical leader, and quantitative trader. My work spans low-level systems, program analysis, distributed systems, production security, research, expert testimony, and quantitative modeling of options, volatility, and portfolio risk.

At heart, I like engineering. I like security, and I usually build security products. I get particularly excited when a problem draws from the breadth of computer science, and I believe the greatest security solutions come from taking a broad view of the paths worth exploring.

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Experience

Where the work happened

  • exnihiloarcanumcapital.com
    present
  • Senior Cloud Engineer II, CrowdStrike
    Cloud Workload Protection Platform
    Sep 2024 – 2026
  • Software Architect, ZeroFox
    Led Threat Intelligence Engineering
    Sep 2017 – Jul 2024
  • Senior Engineer, RiskIQ
    Backend data services, enrichment, instrumentation, scanning
    Oct 2014 – Jun 2017
  • Lead Research Scientist, Appthority
    Static/dynamic analysis of iOS and Android apps
    Sep 2012 – Sep 2014

Education

Berkeley & Illinois

Publications

Research

Systems security, program analysis, mobile malware, and the occasional worm — from Illinois through Berkeley.

  1. Steven Hanna. Attacks on Emerging Architectures. Dissertation. Technical Report, UC Berkeley. Summer 2012. PDF
  2. Steven Hanna, Ling Huang, Edward Wu, Saung Li, Charles Chen, and Dawn Song. Juxtapp: A Scalable System for Detecting Code Reuse Among Android Applications. DIMVA 2012. PDF Slides Springer
  3. Adrienne Porter Felt, Matthew Finifter, Erika Chin, Steven Hanna, and David Wagner. A Survey of Mobile Malware in the Wild. ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Mobile Devices (SPSM) 2011. PDF ACM
  4. Steven Hanna, Rolf Rolles, Andrés Molina-Markham, Pongsin Poosankam, Kevin Fu, and Dawn Song. Take Two Software Updates and See Me in the Morning: The Case for Software Security Evaluations of Medical Devices. USENIX Workshop on Health Security and Privacy (HealthSec) 2011. In collaboration with the Medical Device Security Center; made possible by devices provided by the Open Medical Device Research Library. PDF Slides
  5. Adrienne Porter Felt, Erika Chin, Steven Hanna, Dawn Song, and David Wagner. Android Permissions Demystified. ACM CCS 2011. PDF ACM
  6. Adrienne Porter Felt, Helen Wang, Alex Moshchuk, Steven Hanna, and Erika Chin. Permission Re-Delegation: Attacks and Defenses. USENIX Security 2011. PDF USENIX
  7. Heng Yin, Pongsin Poosankam, Steven Hanna, and Dawn Song. HookScout: Proactive Binary-Centric Hook Detection. DIMVA 2010. Slides Springer
  8. Steven Hanna, Richard Shin, Devdatta Akhawe, Arman Boehm, Prateek Saxena, and Dawn Song. The Emperor's New APIs: On the (In)Secure Usage of New Client-side Primitives. Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP) 2010. PDF W2SP
  9. Prateek Saxena, Devdatta Akhawe, Steven Hanna, Feng Mao, Stephen McCamant, and Dawn Song. A Symbolic Execution Framework for JavaScript. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2010. ✦ AT&T Award for Best Applied Security Research Paper, 2010 PDF
  10. Prateek Saxena, Steven Hanna, Pongsin Poosankam, and Dawn Song. FLAX: Systematic Discovery of Client-side Validation Vulnerabilities in Rich Web Applications. NDSS 2010. PDF
  11. Min Gyung Kang, Heng Yin, Steven Hanna, Stephen McCamant, and Dawn Song. Emulating Emulation-Resistant Malware. VMSec '09: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Virtual Machine Security. PDF
  12. David Nicol, Steven Hanna, William Sanders, and Frank Stratton. Modeling and Analysis of Worm Defense Using Stochastic Activity Networks. Symposium on Simulation Software Security (SSSS '07). PDF
  13. Steven Hanna and David Nicol. Exploring the Behavior of Flash Worms on a Large Topology. Proceedings of the Undergraduate Research Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.
  14. Steven Hanna and David Nicol. Implementation and Instrumentation of a Flash-Worm. Proceedings of the DETERlab Workshop, 2006.
  15. Steven Hanna. Shellcoding for Linux and Windows Tutorial. White paper, 2004. Used in CS498 (Cyber Security Lab) at UIUC and CS38 (Security and Privacy) at Dartmouth, and widely regarded as an excellent source for learning shellcoding. Tutorial