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/Agents) 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

Feel free to contact me 📧 for anything (e.g., details, code, slides) about the following selected papers.

• USENIX Security'26 Firmenstein: Scaling Dynamic Analysis for Linux-Based Firmware Services via API-Centric Intervention Code Synthesis [Code]
  The 35th USENIX Security Symposium, 2026 (CCF-A)
  Yanzhong Wang, Wenhui Zhang, Ruigang Liang, Kai Chen, Yi Yang, Zhiyu Zhang, Junyan Jiang

• ISSTA'25 Unlocking Low Frequency Syscalls in Kernel Fuzzing with Dependency-Based RAG [Paper] [Demo] [Code]
  The 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2025 (CCF-A)
  Zhiyu Zhang, Longxing Li, Ruigang Liang, Kai Chen

• TDSC'25 MalFocus: Locating Malicious Modules in Malware based on Hybrid Deep Learning [Paper]
  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2025 (CCF-A)
  Weihao Huang, Chaoyang Lin, Lu Xiang, Zhiyu Zhang, Guozhu Meng, Lei Xue, Kai Chen, Lei Meng, Zongming Zhang

• USENIX Security'24 DARKFLEECE: Probing the Dark Side of Android Subscription Apps [Paper] [Presentation]
  The 33nd USENIX Security Symposium, 2024 (CCF-A)
  Chang Yue, Chen Zhong, Kai Chen, Zhiyu Zhang, Yeonjoon Lee

• USENIX Security'23 CarpetFuzz: Automatic Program Option Constraint Extraction from Documentation for Fuzzing [Paper] [Presentation] [Code]
  The 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, 2023 (CCF-A)
  Dawei Wang, Ying Li, Zhiyu Zhang, Kai Chen

• SIMUTools'20 Developing an Interactive Web-Based Programming Platform for Learning Computer Networking Protocols [Paper]
  The 12th International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools), 2020
  Dewei Zeng*, Zhiyu Zhang*, Jiye Chen, Xiaojun Hei

• ICTC'20 CyFRS: A Fast Recoverable System for Cyber Range based on Real Network Environment [Paper] [Code]
  The 1st Information Communication Technologies Conference (ICTC), 2020
  Zhiyu Zhang, Guohang Lu, Chengwei Zhang, Yayu Gao, Yajun Wu, Guohui Zhong

🎖 Awards

• 2025 Second Prize in the Software Research Prototype System Competition
• 2025 Outstanding Undergraduate Course Teaching Assistant of UCAS
• 2025 First-Class Academic Scholarship of UCAS
• 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
  • Inscrypt: 2025

💻 Teaching

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

⚒️ Tools

In addition to my research, I have also developed some interesting tools. (Stars and Contributions are welcome!)

• cvm: A compiler version manager for LLVM and GCC.
• 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. 🎹