zhiyuan.zhang at mpi-sp.org
Research Interest
I am interested in understanding and bridging the gap between security assumptions and how systems behave in practice.
My research focuses on software-visible side-channel security. I study how interactions between software and hardware expose sensitive information, analyze their security impact and develop methods to detect and mitigate such leakage. My work brings together computer architecture, cryptography, and programming languages.
[Google Scholar,
DBLP]
Work
- PostDoc at MPI-SP (2024 ~ Present) with Peter Schwabe and Gilles Barthe
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy at University of Melbourne (2022 ~ 2025) [The Security Impact of Microarchitecture Optimizations]
Supervised by Dr. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, A.P Toby Murray and Prof. Yuval Yarom
- Master of Philosophy (Discontinued) at University of Adelaide (2021 ~ 2022)
Supervised by A.P. Yuval Yarom and Dr. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup
- Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced) at University of Adelaide (2018 ~ 2020)
Publication
* Equal Contribution, † Corresponding Author
2027
- Jing Liu, Lucía Martinez Gavieru, Zhiyuan Zhang†, Marcel Böhme, Gilles Barthe. Analyzing Compiler-induced Constant-time Violations with Compiler at Scale. To appear in IEEE S&P, 2027,[paper, CVE-2025-66442, CVE-2025-13912]
- Mohamed ElGhamrawy, Thomas Eisenbarth, Julius Hermelink, Anja Rabich, Florian Sieck, Silvan Streit, Jonas Thietke and Zhiyuan Zhang, Keep Track of Your Errors: Solving ILWE and Improving Attacks on ML-DSA, Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2026, [paper]
2026
- Zhenzhi Lai, Zhiyuan Zhang†, Tian Qiu, Van-Thuan Pham, Udaya Parampalli, A Quantitative Evaluation of Constant-Time Analysis Tools, ACSAC, 2026, [paper]
- Noemi Terzo, Cas Cremers, Ruben Gonzalez, Peter Schwabe, Yuval Yarom and Zhiyuan Zhang, Formal Security Analysis of the Olvid Messenger, CCS, 2026, [paper]
- Santiago Arranz-Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Lionel Blatter, Xingyu Xie, Zhiyuan Zhang, (Dis)Proving Spectre Security with Speculation-Passing Style, OOPSLA, Oct 2026, [paper]
- Santiago Arranz Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Lionel Blatter, Youcef Bouzid, Sören van der Wall, Zhiyuan Zhang, Transparent Decompilation for Timing Side-Channel Analyses, OOPSLA, Oct 2026, [paper]
- Yunlv Lv, Rui Zhang†, Zhiyuan Zhang, Ziyi Wan, Lanxue Zhang, Minhui Xue, Jiangtao Li, Yanan Cao, SMASH: Scalable Maliciously Secure Hybrid Multi-party Computation Framework for Privacy-Preserving Large Language Models, USENIX Security, 2026, [paper]
2025
-
Zhenzhi Lai, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhang, Julius Hermelink, Michael Schwarz, Van-Thuan Pham, Udaya Parampalli, You Only Decapsulate Once: Ciphertext-Independent Single-Trace Passive Side-Channel Attacks on HQC, eprint, [paper, CVE-2025-52473]
- Zhiyuan Zhang, Gilles Barthe, CT-LLVM: Automatic Large-Scale Constant-Time Analysis, eprint, [paper]
- Santiago Arranz Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Benjamin Grégoire, Vincent Laporte, Tiago Oliveira, Peter Schwabe, Yuval Yarom, Zhiyuan Zhang, Protecting cryptographic code against Spectre-RSB, ASPLOS, March 2025, [paper]
2024
- Zhiyuan Zhang*†, Zhenzhi Lai*, Udaya Parampalli, R+R: Demystifying ML-Assisted Side-Channel Analysis Framework: A Case of Image Reconstruction, ACSAC, 2024, [paper, code]
- Shing Hing William Cheng, Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Daniel Genkin, Dallas McNeil, Toby Murray, Yuval Yarom and Zhiyuan Zhang, Evict+Spec+Time: Exploiting Out-of-Order Execution to Improve Cache-Timing Attacks, CHES, Sep 2024, [paper, code]
- Florian Sieck, Zhiyuan Zhang, Sebastian Berndt, Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Yuval Yarom, TeeJam: Sub-Cache-Line Leakages Strike Back, CHES, Sep 2024 [paper, code, CVE-2024-1543]
2023
- Zhiyuan Zhang, Gilles Barthe, Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Peter Schwabe and Yuval Yarom, Ultimate SLH: Taking Speculative Load Hardening to the Next Level, USENIX Security, Aug 2023 [paper, code, presentation, slides]
- Zhiyuan Zhang, Mingtian Tao, Sioli O’Connell, Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Daniel Genkin and Yuval Yarom, BunnyHop: Exploiting the Instruction Prefetcher, USENIX Security, Aug 2023 [paper, code, presentation, slides]
2022
- Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, Daniel Genkin, Yuval Yarom and Zhiyuan Zhang, Side-Channeling the Kalyna Key Expansion, CT-RSA, Feb 2022 paper
Service
- 2027 CHES, USENIX Security
- 2026 CHES, CCS, TIFS, USENIX Security, WOOT, WWW,
- 2025 CCS, ACSAC
- 2024 WWW
- 2023 CHES AE, USENIX AE
- 2022 USENIX AE
Teaching
- Tutor of Cybersecurity Fundamental in 2022
- Tutor of Secure Programming in 2022
- Tutor of Computer Architecture in 2021
Language
- Chinese
- Aussie English
- Learning Deutsche (sufficient to buy Döner)