About me
I am a fourth-year Ph.D student at Peking University, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Qingni Shen and work closely with Zhi Zhang. I am also a visting Ph.D student at National University of Singapore since October 2024, advised and funded by Prof. Trevor E. Carlson. Previously, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Information Security from Hunan University.
My research interests are in system security and computer architecture. In particular, I focus on re-evaluating the rationale behind certain hardware designs, and uncovering new side-channel leakages to offer designers insights for building more secure systems.
News!
- [2025/06] “Achilles” has been awarded the “Honorable Mentions” by Usenix Security 2025 (Top 6% of the accepted papers).
- [2025/04] Our paper “Practical Opcode-based Fault Attack on AES-NI” has been accepted by CHES 2025.
- [2025/02] Three papers, “LeakyDSP”, “AmpereBleed”, and “ZK-Hammer” have been accepted by DAC 2025. See you in San Francisco!
- [2025/01] Our paper “HyperHammer: Breaking Free from KVM-Enforced Isolation” has been accepted by ASPLOS 2025.
- [2025/01] Our paper “Achilles: A Formal Framework of Leaking Secrets from Signature Schemes via Rowhammer” has been accepted by Usenix Security 2025.
- [2024/10] Excited to start my visit at NUS! You can find me at COM3-0217 (Systems & Networking Lab).
- [2024/02] Our paper “ThermalScope: A Practical Interrupt Side Channel Attack Based On Thermal Event Interrupts” has been accepted by DAC 2024.
- [2023/10] Our paper “SegScope: Probing Fine-grained Interrupts via Architectural Footprints” has been accepted by HPCA 2024.
Service
- Reviewer for Conferences: ICISS 2022, ECAI 2023, ATS 2023, ASIACCS 2024, ICICS 2025
- Reviewer for Artifact Evaluation: CCS 2024, Usenix Security 2025, MICRO 2025, ASPLOS 2026, NDSS 2026
- Reviewer for Journal: TIFS, TDSC
Prestigious Awards
- [2025] Presidential Scholarship (Top 2%), Peking University
- [2024] First Prize of Science and Technology Progress Award, Chinese Institute of Electronics [pdf]
- [2022] Runner-up（2/3304）in ECS CloudBuild Developer Competition, Alibaba Cloud [pdf]
- [2022] College Graduate Excellence Award (Top 3%), Hunan Province, China
- [2020] Pacemaker to Merit Student (Top 0.2%), Hunan University, China
Open-Source Contributions
- [2025] Mask Linux thermal interrupt info in /proc and /sys for Docker by default [since v28.0.2]
- [2024] CVE-2024-1545 Wolfssl EdDSA Rowhammer vulnerability
- [2024] CVE-2024-2881 Wolfssl RSA Rowhammer vulnerability
Teaching
- Operating System and Virtualization Security – Teaching Assistant, Fall 2023
Educational Background
- [2024-present] Visiting Research Assistant, National University of Singapore
- [2022-present] Ph.D Student in Software Engineering, Peking University
- Supervisor: Prof. Qingni Shen
- [2018-2022] B.S. in Information Security, Hunan University
Fun Facts
- I enjoy sports, particularly bodybuilding and playing basketball with friends. I allocate 5 hours per week for these activities.
- My name (Xin Zhang) is pronounced similarly to ‘Shin-chan’, a well-known cartoon character.
- My favorite color is green because it typically symbolizes acceptance.