I am a Phd student at Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences starting in September 2021, supervised by Kai Chen. Before that, I received my bachelor degree with honors from School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2021. During that time, I was also an member (Official ID: 637) of Dian Group in HUST.

My research interests include software and system security, especially fuzzing and program analysis. I am passionate about finding vulnerabities in software systems (e.g., Open Source Software, Android Applications, and OS Kernels) and leveraging AI (e.g., LLMs) to make the entire process more intelligent and efficient. In my spare time, I enjoy playing some CTF competitions (as a member of NeSE-B), basketball, and singing.

📝 Publications

• [ISSTA 2025]: Unlocking Low Frequency Syscalls in Kernel Fuzzing with Dependency-based RAG [Paper] [Code]

  In Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), Trondheim, Norway, June 2025

  Zhiyu Zhang, Longxing Li, Ruigang Liang, Kai Chen

• [TDSC 2025]: MalFocus: Locating Malicious Modules in Malware based on Hybrid Deep Learning [Paper]

  In IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), March 2025

  Weihao Huang, Chaoyang Lin, Lu Xiang, Zhiyu Zhang, Guozhu Meng, Lei Xue, Kai Chen, Lei Meng, Zongming Zhang

• [USENIX Security 2024]: DARKFLEECE: Probing the Dark Side of Android Subscription Apps [Paper] [Presentation]

  In Proceedings of the 33nd USENIX Security Symposium, Philadelphia, USA, August 2024

  Chang Yue, Chen Zhong, Kai Chen, Zhiyu Zhang, Yeonjoon Lee

• [USENIX Security 2023]: CarpetFuzz: Automatic Program Option Constraint Extraction from Documentation for Fuzzing [Paper] [Presentation] [Code]

  In Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, USA, August 2023

  Dawei Wang, Ying Li, Zhiyu Zhang, Kai Chen

• [SIMUTools 2020]: Developing an Interactive Web-Based Programming Platform for Learning Computer Networking Protocols [Paper]

  In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools), Virtually, August 2020

  Dewei Zeng*, Zhiyu Zhang*, Jiye Chen, Xiaojun Hei

• [ICTC 2020]: CyFRS: A Fast Recoverable System for Cyber Range based on Real Network Environment [Paper] [Code]

  In Proceedings of the 1st Information Communication Technologies Conference (ICTC), Virtually, June 2020

  Zhiyu Zhang, Guohang Lu, Chengwei Zhang, Yayu Gao, Yajun Wu, Guohui Zhong

🎖 Awards

• 2024 Outstanding Student of UCAS
• 2022 Outstanding Student Cadre of UCAS
• 2021 Honours Degree of HUST (Top 3%)
• 2021 National Scholarship (Top 1%)
• 2020 Second Prize of Goodix Technology Scholarship (Top 5%)
• 2018 Technology Innovation Scholarship (Top 1.8%)

📖 Educations

• 2021.09 - present, PhD student, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
• 2019.08 - 2019.09, Summer Intern in Computational Mechanics, University of California, Berkeley, CA.
• 2017.09 - 2021.06, Undergraduate, Seed Class, Qiming College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan.
• 2014.09 - 2017.06, No.1 Middle School Affiliated to CCNU, Wuhan.

💬 Services

• Artifact Evaluation Committee:
  • USENIX Security: 2023, 2024
  • SOSP: 2023
• Sub-Reviewer:
  • CCS: 2025
  • USENIX Security: 2022, 2024
  • ISSTA: 2024
  • S&P: 2022

💻 Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, Software Security (B2012004Y), UCAS, 2025 Spring

⚒️ Tools

In addition to my research, I have also developed some interesting tools.

• syzqemuctl: A controller for managing QEMU virtual machines created through Syzkaller’s create-image.sh.
• screenctl: A tool for batch management of Linux Screen.
• Scholar-Watcher: A web app for watching the authors’ google scholar, which is based on scholarly and streamlit.
• Matlab-Music: A music composer and player with MATLAB 🎹