Research note / Beijing, China

No. 2026—09

Software security,
examined from within.

I am a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. My research explores automated software security analysis, with a focus on differential fuzzing, program analysis, and agent-assisted vulnerability discovery.

  • Fuzzing
  • Program Analysis
  • Software Security
  • AI for Security
01

News

Our paper SyzPilot was accepted to NDSS 2027.

Started my Ph.D. in Cybersecurity at the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Graduated from UCAS and received the Outstanding Graduate honor.

Our paper Firmenstein was accepted to USENIX Security 2026.

02

Selected Research

R—012025—2026

Root-Cause Localization for Semantic Vulnerabilities

Undergraduate Thesis · IIE, CAS

A bidirectional semantic-specification approach that maps program behavior to security constraints, producing evidence chains and root-cause functions for non-crashing semantic vulnerabilities.

  • Execution-state trees
  • Agent-assisted analysis
  • 90% accuracy on 20 cases
R—022024—2025

Evaluating Differential Fuzzing

Research Practice · IIE, CAS × VUsec

Designed Diffray, a differential fuzzing framework with six testing strategies, and built a benchmark of 18 programs and 182 real-world differential inputs.

  • LibFuzzer & LibAFL
  • OpenSSL, wolfSSL & libpng
  • Real-world vulnerability discovery
03

Publications

2027NDSS

Accepted

SyzPilot: Steering Directed Kernel Fuzzing Beyond Reachability Filtering with Attribution Guidance

Zhiyu Zhang, Longxing Li, Ruigang Liang, Kai Chen, Junyan Jiang, Chen Liang, Changwei Xu

2026USENIX Security

Accepted

Firmenstein: Scaling Dynamic Analysis for Linux-Based Firmware Services via API-Centric Intervention Code Synthesis

Yanzhong Wang, Wenhui Zhang, Ruigang Liang, Kai Chen, Yi Yang, Zhiyu Zhang, Junyan Jiang

04

Education

Ph.D. in Cybersecurity

Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Software security analysis theory and techniques

B.Eng. in Cybersecurity

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

GPA 3.89 / 4.00 · Ranked 2 / 30

05

Selected Honors

Outstanding Graduate, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

National Scholarship

Outstanding Student Pacesetter, UCAS

Undergraduate Academic Scholarship, UCAS

Outstanding Student, UCAS

Outstanding Communist Youth League Cadre, UCAS