Dr. Mengfei Ren

Education 

• PhD, Computer Science, University of Texas Arlington (2023)
• MS, Computer Science, University of Texas Arlington (2013)
• BS, Computer Science, China University of Petroleum (2011) 

Research Interests 

• Fuzz Testing
• IoT Wireless Protocol Testing
• Modern Compilers/Decompilers Analysis
• Ad-hoc Ecosystems Testing 

Bio 

Dr. Mengfei Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer at Baylor University. Prior to joining Baylor, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Alabama in Huntsville. She received her Ph.D. degree and M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Texas at Arlington in 2023 and 2013. 

Her research focuses on Software Engineering. Specifically, she is dedicated to developing comprehensive analysis and testing frameworks to enhance correctness and robustness of IoT ecosystems, modern compilers and ad-hoc ecosystems. Her publications have appeared in prestigious conferences and journals including FSE, ASPLOS, HOST, ESORICS, WiSec and DTRAP, etc. She also serves as PC members and peer reviewers for several conferences and journals, such as IEEE SoutheastCon and JSS, etc. 

Selected Publications 

Xiaolei Ren, Mengfei Ren, Yu Lei, and Jiang Ming. 2025. Revisiting Optimization-Resilience Claims in Binary Di[ing Tools: Insights from LLVM Peephole Optimization Analysis. Proc. ACM Softw. Eng. 2, FSE, Article FSE119 (July 2025), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3729389

E. Leal, M. Ren, S. Li and J. Ming, "Low-Entropy Packed Binary Detection via Accurate Hardware Events Profiling," 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), San Jose, CA, USA, 2025, pp. 346-357, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11050036

Ren, M., Zhang, H., Ren, X., Ming, J., Lei, Y. (2024). Intelligent Zigbee Protocol Fuzzing via Constraint-Field Dependency Inference. In: Tsudik, G., Conti, M., Liang, K., Smaragdakis, G. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2023. ESORICS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14345. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51476-0_23 

Haotian Zhang, Mengfei Ren, Yu Lei, and Jiang Ming. 2022. One size does not fit all: security hardening of MIPS embedded systems via static binary debloating for shared libraries. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503222.3507768

Mengfei Ren, Xiaolei Ren, Huadong Feng, Jiang Ming, and Yu Lei. 2021. Z-Fuzzer: deviceagnostic fuzzing of Zigbee protocol implementation. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 347–358. https://doi.org/10.1145/3448300.3468296