About me

_{I’m a lecturer (equivalent to assistant professor in US) in the University of Western Australia. Prior to that, I was Research Scientist at CSIRO’s Data61, Australia. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales, Australia. My research interests are in the areas of system security, rowhammer, and adversarial artificial intelligence.}

News!

• _{Our paper “Try to Poison My Deep Learning Data? Nowhere to Hide Your Trajectory Spectrum!” has been accepted by NDSS 2025.}
• _{Our paper “Yes, One-Bit-Flip Matters! Universal DNN Model Inference Depletion with Runtime Code Fault Injection” has received a Distinguished Paper Award from USENIX Security 2024!}
• _{Our paper “Watch Out! Simple Horizontal Class Backdoor Can Trivially Evade Defense” has been accepted by CCS 2024.}
• _{Our paper “SoK: Rowhammer on Commodity Operating” has been accepted by ASIACCS 2024.}
• _{Our paper “SegScope: Probing Fine-grained Interrupts via Architectural Footprints” has been accepted by HPCA 2024.}
• _{Our paper “DeepTheft: Stealing DNN Model Architectures through Power Side Channel” has been accepted by Oakland 2024.}

Working Experience

• _{2022.12-present: Lecturer}
  • _{University of Western Australia}
• _{2022.4-2022.12: Research Scientist}
  • _{Data61, CSIRO}
  • _{Supervisor: Dr. Dongxi Liu and Dr. Surya Nepal}
• _{2020.11-2022.4: Postdotoral Fellow}
  • _{Data61, CSIRO}
  • _{Supervisor: Dr. Dongxi Liu and Dr. Surya Nepal}
• _{2020.8-2020.11: Postdotoral Fellow}
  • _{Swinburne University of Technology}
  • _{Supervisor: Prof. Yang Xiang}

Prestigious Awards

• _{[2024] USENIX SECURITY Distinguished Paper Award}
• _{[2023] ASIACCS Distinguished Paper Award}
• _{[2022] CSIRO’s SCS Program Collaboration Award}
• _{[2022] CSIRO’s SCS Program Science Excellence Award}
• _{[2021] UNSW Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses (Top 10%)}
• _{[2017-2020] UNSW International Postgraduate Award and CSIRO Top-up Phd Scholarship}
• _{[2012] Peking University Scholarship, China (Top 3%)}
• _{[2010] College Graduate Excellence Award, Sichuan Province, China (Top 1%)}
• _{[2009] National Scholarship, China (Top 3%)}

Invited Industrial Talks

• _{[2020] A New Rowhammer Technique to Break ALL Existing Defenses
  Yueqiang Cheng, Zhi Zhang
  CanSecWest}
  

• _{[2019] Winter is Coming Back: Defeating the Most Advanced Rowhammer Defenses to Gain Root and Kernel Privileges
  Yueqiang Cheng, Zhi Zhang, Surya Nepal, Zhi Wang
  Black Hat Asia}
  

Open-Source Contributions

• _{[2023] /sys/devices/virtual/powercap accessible by default to containers (Docker Container Security Issue)}
  
• _{[2016] VT-d: make flush-all actually flush all (Xen Patch)}
  
• _{[2013] CVE-2013-6375 (Xen Vulnerability)}
  
• _{[2013] fix linear page table construction in alloc l2 table (Xen Patch)}
  

Educational Background

• _{[2017-2021] Ph.D. in computer science, University of New South Wales}
  • _{Supervisor: Dr. Surya Nepal}
• _{[2011-2014] M.S. in software engineering, Peking University}
  • _{Supervisor: Prof. Qingni Shen}
• _{[2012-2013] Visiting Research Assistant, Singapore Managment University}
• _{[2007-2011] B.S. in communication engineering, Sichuan University}