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 “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 “Yes, One-Bit-Flip Matters! Universal DNN Model Inference Depletion with Runtime Code Fault Injection” has been accepted by USENIX Security 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

  • [2023] AsiaCCS Distinguished Papers 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