Weidong Cui

Partner Research Manager

À propos

I am a partner research manager managing the Security Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond. My research interests lie in the areas of systems and software security and reliability. Since I joined MSR, I have worked on a few topics: confidential computing, hypervisor fuzzing, reverse debugging of production failures, crash dump triaging, typing dynamic data for memory analysis, and automatic protocol reverse engineering. In addition to writing papers, I enjoy developing security and software tools that are useful in the real world. For instance, the RETracer tool of which I led the design and development has been running inside Microsoft as the primary triaging tool for access violations since March 2015. Lately, I led the design and development of a reverse debugging system called REPT. REPT was deployed in the error reporting ecosystem of Windows (currently only for Microsoft developers). Our OSDI ’18 paper (opens in new tab) about REPT won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award! My recent focus is on securing confidential cloud services. Our work on AMD SEV-SNP helped enable confidential containers (opens in new tab) on Azure. We built a practical append-only ledger system (opens in new tab) to protect confidential services from rollback attacks. Our recent work on building a fully verified security module for confidential VMs received the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award from OSDI ’24.