Fengwei Zhang Associate Professor Director, COMPASS Lab Department of Computer Science and Engineering Southern University of Science and Technology Contact: Room 515, South Tower, College of Engineering 1088 Xueyuan Ave, Nanshan District Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China 518055 Phone: (+86) (755) 88015160 Email: zhangfw [at] sustech dot edu dot cn Lab: Room 441A, South Tower, College of Eng.

---

As of September 2019, I am a tenure-track Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). My primary research interests are in the areas of systems security, with a focus on trustworthy execution, hardware-assisted security, debugging transparency, transportation security, and plausible deniability encryption.

Before joining SUSTech, I spent four wonderful years as an Assistant Professor at Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University (WSU). I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from George Mason University in April 2015.


    My research group: [COMPASS@SUSTech].


I am looking for graduate students, postdocs, undergraduate students to work with me on exciting projects in systems security. If you are interested, please send me your CV. Multiple fully funded positions are available [Hire Link, 招聘启示] [SUSTech Ph.D. Scholarship For International Students].

Multiple Postdoc Openings.

---

Teaching

• Spring 2023: CS 109, Introduction to Computer Programming
• Fall 2022: CS 315, Computer Security

• Previous Semesters: [full list]

---

Selected Recent Publications [full list]

Authors with "_" is student/scholar in my lab or courses; ˆ indicates equal contribution; * indicates the corresponding author.

• Shelter: Extending Arm CCA with Isolation in User Space  
  Yiming Zhangˆ, Yuxin Huˆ, Zhenyu Ning, Fengwei Zhang*, Xiapu Luo, Haoyang Huang, Shoumeng Yan, and Zhengyu He
  To Appear In Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'23), Anaheim, CA, August 2023.
  


• Alligator In Vest: A Practical Failure-Diagnosis Framework via Arm Hardware Features  
  Yiming Zhang, Yuxin Hu, Haonan Li, Wenxuan Shi, Zhenyu Ning, Xiapu Luo, and Fengwei Zhang
  To Appear In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'23), Seattle, Washington, July 2023.
  


• FlushTime: Towards Mitigating Flush-based Cache Attacks via Collaberating Flush Instructions & Timers on ARMv8-A  
  Jingquan Ge and Fengwei Zhang*
  To Appear In Proceedings of the 18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS'23), Melbourne, Australia, July 2023.
  


• Revisiting ARM Debugging Features: Nailgun and Its Defense  
  Zhenyu Ning, Chenxu Wang, Yinhua Chen, Fengwei Zhang*, and Jiannong Cao
  In IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC'23), Vol.20, No.1, pp.574-589, 2023. Impact Factor: 6.404.
  


• StrongBox: A GPU TEE on Arm Endpoints  [slides]
  Yunjie Dengˆ, Chenxu Wangˆ, Shunchang Yu, Shiqing Liu, Zhenyu Ning, Kevin Leach, Jin Li, Shoumeng Yan, Zhengyu He, Jiannong Cao, and Fengwei Zhang*
  In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'22), Los Angeles, CA, November 2022.
  


• Raven: A Novel Kernel Debugging Tool on RISC-V  [slides]
  Hongyi Lu, Fengwei Zhang*
  In Proceedings of the 59th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC'22), San Francisco, CA, July 2022.
  


• SMILE: Secure Memory Introspection for Live Enclave  [slides]
  Lei Zhou, Xuhua Ding, Fengwei Zhang*
  In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'22), San Francisco, CA, May 2022.
  


• SOTER: Guarding Black-box Inference for General Neural Networks at the Edge  
  Tianxiang Shen, Ji Qi, Jianyu Jiang, Xian Wang, Siyuan Wen, Xusheng Chen, Shixiong Zhao, Sen Wang, Li Chen, Xiapu Luo, Fengwei Zhang, and Heming Cui
  In Proceedings of the 2022 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'22), San Francisco, CA, July 2022.
  


• Speedster: An Efficient Multi-party State Channel via Enclaves  
  Jinghui Liao, Fengwei Zhang*, Wenhai Sun, and Weisong Shi
  In Proceedings of the 17th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS'22), Nagasaki, Japan, May 2022.
  


• RetTag: Hardware-assisted Return Address Integrity on RISC-V   [slides]
  Yu Wang, Jinting Wu, Tai Yue, Zhenyu Ning*, and Fengwei Zhang
  In Proceedings of the 15th European Workshop on Systems Security (EuroSec'22), in conjunction with the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'22), Rennes, France, April 2022.


• Securing Big Data Scientific Workflows via Trusted Heterogeneous Environments  
  Saeid Mofradˆ, Ishtiaq Ahmedˆ, Fengwei Zhang*, Shiyong Lu, Ping Yang, and Heming Cui
  In IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC'22), Vol.19, No.6, pp.4187-4203, 2022. Impact Factor: 6.404.
  

Recent Professional Services

Program Organization

[CCS]: Proceedings Co-Chair, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2022.

[ML4CS]: General Chair, International Conference on Machine Learning for Cyber Security, 2020.

[EuroSec]: Publicity Chair, European Workshop on Systems Security, 2018, 2019.

[IWCSS]: Program Co-Chair, International Workshop on Cyberspace Security, 2019.

[CCSW]: Publicity Chair, ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop, 2017.

Program Committee Membership

[S&P]: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“Oakland”), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

[USENIX-Security]: USENIX Security Symposium, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

[CCS]: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023.

[NDSS]: ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2023, 2024.

[DAC]: IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, 2022, 2023.

[ACSAC]: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

[DSN]: IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2020, 2021, 2023.

[ESORICS]: European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, 2020, 2021, 2023.

[AsiaCCS]: ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2021, 2022.

[WiSec]: ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 2019, 2020, 2022.

[SecureComm]: EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, 2023.

[VehicleSec]: Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy, 2023.

[EthiCS]: International Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security, 2023.

[ARES]: International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, 2020.

[HPBD&IS]: International Conference on High Performance Big Data and Intelligent Systems, 2020.

[EuroSec]: European Workshop on Systems Security, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

[AutoSec]: International Workshop on Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Security, 2021, 2022.

[MASS]: IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems, 2018, 2019.

[SecureComm]: EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, 2018.

[ICICS]: International Conference on Information and Communications Security, 2018, 2021.

[IoTSSP]: ACM MobiHoc Workshop on Mobile IoT Sensing, Security, and Privacy, 2018.

[ICC]: IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2018.

[CCSW]: ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop, 2017.

[HASP]: Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, 2017.

[ICPADS]: IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2016.

Artifact Evaluation Committee

[USENIX-Security]: USENIX Security Symposium, 2020.

[ACSAC]: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2019, 2020, 2022.

[WOOT]: USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, 2019.

---

Thesis

• Using Hardware Isolated Execution Environments for Securing Systems  [bib]