Home
Qiang Liu#
PostDoc in System Security at EPFL.
On the academic job market (2025-2026)
Open to faculty position in system security, trustworthy AI system
CV / Google Scholar / GitHub / Email
Research Vision#
I investigate how to establish a chain of trust spanning the entire technology stack, from low-level software to user applications, and from individual computers to large-scale distributed and heterogeneous systems. To that end, I develop:
- Dynamic analysis platforms capable of reproducing and examining full-chain exploits,
- Vulnerability techniques, both pre-release detection and post-release mitigation, and
- Model-driven abstractions that unify software and hardware.
Ultimately, my goal is to builds toward end-to-end trustworthy computing systems.
Selected Publications#
Truman: Constructing Device Behavior Models from OS Drivers to Fuzz Virtual
Devices
Zheyu Ma, Qiang Liu, Zheming Li, Tingting Yin, Wende Tan, Chao Zhang, Mathias
Payer
NDSS 2025
HYPERPILL: Fuzzing for Hypervisor-bugs by Leveraging the Hardware Virtualization
Interface
(Best Paper Award)
Alexander Bulekov, Qiang Liu, Manuel Egele, Mathias Payer
USENIX Security 2024
Tango: Extracting Higher-Order Feedback through State Inference
(Best Paper Award)
Ahmad Hazimeh, Duo Xu, Qiang Liu (Corresponding Author), Yan Wang, Mathias Payer
ACM RAID 2024
VIDEZZO: Dependency-aware Virtual Device Fuzzing
Qiang Liu, Flavio Toffalini, Yajin Zhou, Mathias Payer
IEEE S&P 2023
FIRMGUIDE: Boosting the Capability of Rehosting Embedded Linux Kernels through
Model-Guided Kernel Execution
Qiang Liu, Cen Zhang (Co-first Author), Lin Ma, Muhui Jiang, Yajin Zhou, Lei
Wu, Wenbo Shen, Xiapu Luo, Yang Liu, Kui Ren
IEEE/ACM ASE 2021
Selected Services#
Program Committees: USENIX Security 2025, IEEE/ACM ASE 2025
Reviewer: ACM TIFS, ACM CSUR, ACM TOSEM
Biography#
Qiang Liu is a postdoc at EPFL, working with Prof. Mathias Payer in the HexHive laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in 2023 from Zhejiang University (ZJU) under the guidance of Prof. Yajin Zhou. His research interest is system security that seeks to establish chain of trust spanning the entire technology stack, from low-level software to user applications, and from individual computers to large-scale distributed and heterogeneous systems, by 1) building dynamic analysis platforms to examine the chain of trust through full-chain exploits; and, 2) on top of these platforms, developing both pre- release vulnerability identification and post-release attack mitigation techniques, grounded in a deep understanding of hardware and software. His work has been recognized at all the top security conferences: IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, and ISOC NDSS. He received the Best Paper Awards at USENIX Security'24 and ACM RAID'24. He is also serving on the program committee for IEEE/ACM ASE'25 and USENIX Security'25 and has reviewed for journals including IEEE TIFS, ACM CSUR, and ACM TOSEM.