UCI Ph.D. student Dokyung Song along with his advisor Michael Franz and Post-Doctoral Researcher Yeoul Na presented their work on the Periscope automatic programming error-finding framework at Black Hat 2019 in Las Vegas. With approximately 20,000 attendees, Black Hat is the most prestigious computer security event on the planet and is attended by the CIOs and CISOs of most major corporations.

The work of the UCI research group has not just theoretical importance, but also major practical significance. In the course of their project, they discovered nine previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy flagship phones, and were awarded eight CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) entries in the National Vulnerability Database. Due to responsible disclosure, all of these vulnerabilities were fixed by the respective manufacturers before the UCI presented them to the public.