About me
I am a 4th-year PhD student at Peking University, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Qingni Shen and work closely with Zhi Zhang. Previously, I was a visiting student at National University of Singapore advised by Prof. Trevor E. Carlson, and was also a research intern at Huawei Technologies. Before starting my PhD, I obtained my bachelor’s degree from Hunan University, where I received the Pacemaker to Merit Student Award.
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!
- [2026/01] I will be joining the School of Computer Science and Technology at Shandong University as an Associate Professor in this summer. Please feel free to contact me by email if you are interested in working with me (at SDU or PKU).
- [2025/10] My visit at NUS has come to an end. I’m deeply grateful for all the experiences, collaborations, and friendships that made this journey unforgettable.
- [2025/09] Our paper “MUXLeak: Exploiting Multiplexers as a Power Side Channel against Multi-tenant FPGAs” has been published in TCAD.
- [2025/06] “Achilles” has been awarded the “Honorable Mentions” by USENIX Security 2025 (only 25 out of 2385 submissions).
- [2025/06] Our paper “Fantastic Interrupts and Where to Find Them: Exploiting Non-movable Interrupts on x86” has been published in TIFS.
- [2025/02] Three papers, “LeakyDSP”, “AmpereBleed”, and “ZK-Hammer” have been accepted by DAC 2025. See you in San Francisco!
- [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, USENIX Security 2026
- Reviewer for Journal: TIFS, TDSC
Honors and Awards
- [2025] USENIX SECURITY Honorable Mention Paper Award
- [2025] Presidential Scholarship (Top 2%), Peking University
- [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 (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
Working Experience
- [2025.11-2026.01] Research Intern, 2012 Lab, Huawei Technologies
Educational Background
- [2022-present] Ph.D Student in Software Engineering, Peking University
- Supervisor: Prof. Qingni Shen
- [2024.10-2025.10] Visiting Ph.D Student, National University of Singapore
- Supervisor: Prof. Trevor E. Carlson
- [2018-2022] B.S. in Information Security, Hunan University
Fun Facts
- I enjoy sports, particularly bodybuilding and playing basketball with friends. I allocate 5-10 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.