About me

_{I’m a Senior lecturer (equivalent to associate professor in US) in the University of Western 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 hardware security, system security, and their intersections with AI security.}

News!

• _{Our paper “Towards Practical Interrupt Side Channel Attacks on macOS for Apple Silicon” has been accepted by ISCA 2026.}
• _{Our paper “TimeGaps Channels: Exploiting CPU Halted Time for Fun and Profit” has been accepted by ISCA 2026.}
• _{Our paper “GeForge: Hammering GDDR Memory to Forge GPU Page Tables for Fun and Profit” has been accepted by IEEE S&P 2026.}
• _{Our paper “UncoreBleed: AEX-Free, High-Resolution, and Low-Noise Side-Channel Attacks on SGX Enclaved Execution” has been accepted by USENIX SEC 2026.}

Working Experience

• _{2025.8-Present: Senior Lecturer}
  • _{University of Western Australia}
• _{2023.1-2025.8: 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: Postdoctoral Fellow}
  • _{Data61, CSIRO}
  • _{Supervisor: Dr. Dongxi Liu and Dr. Surya Nepal}
• _{2020.8-2020.11: Postdoctoral Fellow}
  • _{Swinburne University of Technology}
  • _{Supervisor: Prof. Yang Xiang}

Prestigious Awards

• _{[2025] USENIX SECURITY Honorable Mention Paper Award}
• _{[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

• _{[2026] Silicon Valley’s Quiet Leak: Revealing User Activity on macOS for Apple Silicon
  Xin Zhang, Zhi Zhang, Chang Liu, Qingni Shen, Trevor E. Carlson
  Black Hat Asia}
  

• _{[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

• _{[2024] CVE-2024-2881, CVE-2024-1545, CVE-2023-51939, CVE-2024-28285, CVE-2024-31510 (Cryptographic Libraries)}
  
• _{[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}