I am looking for self-motivated PhD students starting from Spring 2024 with full financial support. Preference will be given to candidates with experience in reverse engineering, IoT/mobile security and program analysis. If you are interested, please send your CV and transcripts to yz899@drexel.edu.   Kindly ensure that you have thoroughly reviewed some of my recent papers and possess a genuine interest in my research.  It is strongly advised to peruse these valuable recommendations before reaching out via email.

⌚ News

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✯ 2023. Sep - I will serve as an Editor for Blockchain (ISSN 2958-8138) -𝕟𝕖𝕨 !

✯ 2023. July -  I will serve as a TPC Member for IoT-SCTI-23 (co-located with ACSAC 2023)-𝕟𝕖𝕨 !

✯ 2023. June - I will serve as a Track Chair for IEEE MSN -𝕟𝕖𝕨 !

✯ 2023. June - I will serve as a TPC Member for  SaTS 2023 Workshop (co-located with CCS 2023)  

✯ 2023. May - one paper accepted by  USENIX Security 2023 

✯ 2023. May - I will serve as a TPC Member for USENIX Security 2024 

✯ 2023. May- Two papers accepted by  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) , 2023 -𝕟𝕖𝕨 !

✯ 2023.Mar -  I will serve as a TPC Member for NDSS 2024 

✯ 2022. Dec  - I will serve as a TPC Member for ACM CCS 2023 

✯ 2022. Nov. One paper won the ACM CCS'22 Best Paper Honorable Mention

 ✯ 2022. Oct-  One paper accepted by  The Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2023 

✯ 2022. Sep- Two papers accepted by  The Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2023 

✯ 2022. Aug- One paper accepted by  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) , 2022 

✯ 2022. Mar - One paper accepted by  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) , 2022 

♚ MAJOR HONORS AND AWARDS

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Awards:

• 2022: CCS'22 Best Paper Honorable Mention (ACM CCS 2022)

• 2021: The First Prize, Outstanding Research Paper Award of Guang Dong Computer Federation ("DeepChain: Auditable and Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning with Blockchain-based Incentive.")

• 2020: Excellent Graduate Students of Guangdong Province [0.25%]

• 2019: The First Prize, Outstanding Research Paper Award of Guang Dong Computer Federation ("CrowdBC: A blockchain-based decentralized framework for crowdsourcing.")

• 2019: Best Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet

• 2019: One paper was listed on Essential Science Indicators (ESI)  ranking as "Highly Cited Paper" from Web of Science

• 2018: National scholarship for Ph. D Students in Cyber Security, 50000 RMB 

• 2016: Outstanding Graduates  

• 2015: National scholarship for Master Students, 20000 RMB

• 2015: Reaching Fund on Android Security, 4000 RMB 

• 2014: The Third Prize, Microsoft ImagineCup for College Students in Shannxi Province,1000RMB

• 2014: The First Prize,  Science and Technology Contest for College Students, Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Corporation

• 2014: The Second Prize , Software Design Competition, Programmable System Inc, Shanghai, China

Selected CVEs & Vulnerabilities:

• 2022: Tencent has confirmed with 6 vulnerabilities, ranked 3  low, 2 medium and 1 high, and awarded us with bug bounties (5,000 USD).  

• 2021: We discovered two vulnerabilities in Mosquitto version 2.0.7 (CVE-2021-28166 and CVE-2021-34432).

• 2020: We identified a vulnerability with wide-reaching implications across Bluetooth specifications (CVE-2020-35473), impacting all Bluetooth devices.

• 2020: We have identified a few Bluetooth vulnerabilities of Apple products. Apple acknowledged our findings and released a patch. Details can be tracked via CVE-2020-9770; 

• 2020: The Google Android Security Team also acknowledged the Bluetooth design flaws and rated the identified Android vulnerabilities as High severity Details can be tracked via Android ID 130833727.

• 2019: TI's PSIRT has released a patched SDK to "Update authentication parameters when transitioning between authenticated/non-authenticated pairing'' based on the reported vulnerabilities of TI's BLE stack (CVE-2020-16630). 

• 2019: Two CVEs (CVE-2019-18388 and CVE-2019-18389) were assigned to track the bugs identified in QEMU/KVM Virtio Devices.

• 2018: The accessibility abusing vulnerabilities could be tracked through AndroidID-79268769 and CVE-2018-9376. 

• 2016: I was under the supervision of Prof. Dong Zheng when I was chasing my Master Degree. I worked closely with him and explored the design flaws that severely undermine the security of Cloud Drives. The findings were widely reported by mainstream media in China, including China Central Television (CCTV), Weibo, Sohu and various other presses.  [▶ refer to news from CCTV]

✒  Recent Publications (Complete list)

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I have published more than 30 papers. My publications appeared in top-tier conferences (e.g., Usenix Security,  ACM CCS, NDSS, SIGMETRICS, Blackhat Asia, INFOCOM), and top-tier journals (e.g., TDSC, TPDS). 

✍  BOOK CHAPTERS

1. Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Rajib Dey and Xinwen Fu, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Security and Privacy, Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks, Springier Nature Switzerland AG, 2019 [PDF]

✍  CONFERENCES

1. [USENIX Security23] - Chao Wang, Yue Zhang, and Zhiqiang Lin. One Size Does Not Fit All: Uncovering And Exploiting Cross Platform Discrepant APIs in Wechat. In 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23), 2023.[Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A]

2. [CCS 23b] Chao Wang, Yue Zhang, and Zhiqiang Lin. Uncovering and Exploiting Hidden APIs in Mobile Super Apps. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. November 2023.[Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A]

3. [CCS 23a] Yue Zhang, Yuqing Yang, and Zhiqiang Lin. Don’t Leak Your Keys: Understanding, Measuring, and Exploiting the AppSecret Leaks in Mini-Programs. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. November 2023.[Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A]

4. [ICSE 23] Chao Wang, Ronny Ko, Yue Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Zhiqiang Lin. TAINTMINI: Detecting Flow of Sensitive Data in Mini-Programs with Static Taint Analysis.  To appear in The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2023.[Tier 1] [CCF-A]

5. [NDSS 23c] Chongqing Lei, Zhen Ling, Yue Zhang, Kai Dong, Kaizheng Liu, Junzhou Luo, Xinwen Fu, 'Do Not Give a Dog Bread Every Time He Wags His Tail: Stealing Passwords through Content Queries (CONQUER) Attacks'.  In Proceedings of the 30th Network and Distributed System Security,  San Diego, CA, April 2023.  [Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A]

6. [NDSS 23b] Caiqin Dong, Jian Weng, Jia-Nan Liu, Yue Zhang, Yao Tong, Anjia Yang, Yudan Cheng, and Shun Hu. “Fusion: Efficient and Secure Inference Resilient to Malicious Servers”. In Proceedings of the 30th ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, April 2023.  [Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A]

7. [NDSS 23a] Mohit K. Jangid*, Yue Zhang*, Zhiqiang Lin. “Extrapolating Formal Analysis to Uncover Attacks in Bluetooth Passkey Entry Pairing”. In Proceedings of the 30th ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, April 2023.  [Tier 1] [BIG4] [CCF-A] (Co-First Author)

8. [CCS 22b] - Allen Y. Yang, Yue Zhang, Zhiqiang Lin. "Cross Miniapp Request Forgery: Root Causes, Attacks, and Vulnerability Detection". In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. November 2022. [CCF-A][Tier 1] [BIG4] 

9. [ICDCS 22] - Shan Wang, Zhen Ling, Yue Zhang, Ruizhao Liu, Joshua Kraunelisk, Kang Jia, Bryan Pearson, Xinwen Fu. "Implication of Animation on Android Security", to appear in International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. [CCF-B]

10. [CCS 22a] - Yue Zhang, Zhiqiang Lin. "When Good Becomes Evil: Tracking Bluetooth Low Energy Devices via Allowlist-based Side Channel and Its Countermeasure". In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. November 2022. [Best Paper Honorable Mention][CCF-A][Tier 1] [BIG4] 

11. [INFOCOM 22] - Pearson Bryan, Yue Zhang, Cliff Zou, and Xinwen Fu. “FUME: Fuzzing Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Brokers.” accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 2022

12. [SIGMETRICS 21] . Yue Zhang, Bayan Turkistani, Allen Yuqing Yang, Chaoshun Zuo, and Zhiqiang Lin. "A Measurement Study of Wechat Mini-Apps",  In Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems (POMACS). June 2021. [Tier 1][AR 12.1%] [CCF-B]

13. [ICDCS 21] - Shan Wang, Ming Yang, Yue Zhang, Yan Luo, Tingjian Ge, Xinwen Fu, Wei Zhao. "On Private Data Collection of Hyperledger Fabric", to appear in International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. [CCF-B][AR 19.8 %]

14. [INFOCOM 21] - Zhen Ling, Ruizhao Liu, Yue Zhang, Kang Jia, Bryan Pearson, Xinwen Fu, Junzhou Luo, "Prison Break of Android Reflection Restriction and Defense", accepted to appear in Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, May 10-13, 2021. [CCF-A][AR 19.9%]

15. [USENIX Security20] -Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Rajib Dey, Yier Jin, Zhiqiang Lin, and Xinwen Fu. "Breaking Secure Pairing of Bluetooth Low Energy Using Downgrade Attacks", To appear in Usenix Security 2020 [CCF-A][Tier 1] [BIG4] [AR 16.1%][PDF][Slides][Talk]

16. [BlackHat Asia 20] - Zhijian Shao, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang. "3d Red Pill: A Guest-to-Host Escape on QEMU/KVM Virtio Device" , To appear in BlackHat Asia 2020. [PDF][Slides]

17. [INFOCOM 20]- Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Zhen Ling,  Bryan Pearson, and Xinwen Fu. "BLESS: A BLE Application Security Scanning Framework" accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications ,2020. [CCF-A][AR 19.8%][PDF][Code]

18. [RAID 19]-Wenrui Diao, Yue Zhang, Li Zhang, Zhou Li, Fenghao Xu, Xiaorui Pan, Xiangyu Liu, Jian Weng, Kehuan Zhang, XiaoFeng Wang. Kindness is a Risky Business: On the Usage of the Accessibility APIs in Android,Accepted by the 22nd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, Beijing, China, September, 2019. [CCF-B][AR 22%]

19. [ICII 19]-Gao Chao, Luo Lan,Yue Zhang, Pearson Bryan, Fu Xinwen,"Microcontroller Based IoT System Firmware Security: Case Studies ",IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet. [Invited paper][Best Paper Award]

✍  JOURNALS 

1. [IoT-J22] - Luo, Lan, Yue Zhang, Clayton White, Brandon Keating, Bryan Pearson, Xinhui Shao, Zhen Ling, Haofei Yu, Cliff Zou, and Xinwen Fu. "On Security of TrustZone-M Based IoT Systems." IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2022).

2. [TDSC 21b] -Shao, Zhijian, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang, Yongdong Wu, Ming Li, Jiasi Weng, Weiqi Luo, and Shui Yu. "Peripheral-free Device Pairing by Randomly Switching Power." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, to appear, 2021.[CCF-A] 

3. [TDSC 21a] -Hongwei Huang, Weiqi Luo, Guoqiang Zeng, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang, and Anjia Yang, DAMIA: Leveraging Domain Adaptation as a Defense against Membership Inference Attacks, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, to appear, 2021.[CCF-A] 

4. [IoT-J 21] - Liu, Kaizheng, Ming Yang, Zhen Ling, Huaiyu Yan, Yue Zhang, Xinwen Fu, and Wei Zhao. "On Manually Reverse Engineering Communication Protocols of Linux Based IoT Systems." IEEE Internet of Things Journal .[JCR-Q1]

5. [TVT 20] - Kang-Di Lu, Guo-Qiang Zeng, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang, Ming Li. "An Adaptive Resilient Load Frequency Controller for Smart Grids with DoS Attacks" IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. [JCR-Q2]

6. [TDSC 19b] - Weng Jia-Si, Jian Weng, Ming Li, Yue Zhang, and Weiqi Luo. "DeepChain: Auditable and Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning with Blockchain-based Incentive.", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2019). [CCF-A] [Highly Cited Paper]

7. [TDSC 19a] - Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng, Lin Hou, Anjia Yang, Ming Li, Yang Xiang, and Robert Deng. "Looking Back! Using Early Versions of Android Apps as Attack Vectors." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2019). [CCF-A]

8. [TPDS 18] -Li, Ming, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang, Wei Lu, Yue Zhang, Lin Hou, Jia-Nan Liu, Yang Xiang, and Robert H. Deng. "CrowdBC: A blockchain-based decentralized framework for crowdsourcing." IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ,30, no. 6 (2018): 1251-1266. [CCF-A] [Highly Cited Paper]

9. [TVT 18]-Weng, Jia-Si, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang, Weiqi Luo, and Weiming Lan. "Benbi: Scalable and dynamic access control on the northbound interface of SDN-based Vanet." IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 68, no. 1 (2018): 822-831.[JCR-Q2]

⌫ Useful Links

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• Top Crypto and Security Conferences Ranking

• CCF Conference and Journal Rankings

• Top Security Authors