About me

I am a third-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. For more details, you can refer to my CV.

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!

• [2025/03] Our paper “Practical Opcode-based Fault Attack on AES-NI” has been conditionally 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.
• [2024/11] I will serve as a AEC member of 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, CCS 2024 Artifact Evaluation, Usenix Security 2025 Artifact Evaluation
• Reviewer for Journal: TIFS

Prestigious Awards

• [2024] First Prize of Science and Technology Progress Award, Chinese Institute of Electronics.
• [2022] Runner-up（2/3304）in ECS CloudBuild Developer Competition, Alibaba Cloud.
• [2022] College Graduate Excellence Award, Hunan Province, China.
• [2019] National Scholarship, China.

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.

Friend Links

• Shengfang Zhai

• Junkai Liang