Zhineng Zhong

dblp:361/1367 · DBLP profile ↗
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6ranked-venue papers
1as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0007-2490-5671ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 2 · 2 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 SymFlow: Event-Chain-Aware Symbolic Execution for Serverless Sensitive Data Flow Detection
abstract
Serverless applications are widely adopted for their scalability, cost-efficiency, and elastic resource management. However, their event-driven nature introduces complex event chains whose trigger-handler relationships are often determined dynamically by conditional logic, asynchronous callbacks, and resource-state dependencies. Existing security analysis tools, such as CloudFlow, mainly rely on static analysis, making it difficult to capture these dynamic event-chain interactions and the semantics of coarse-grained cloud APIs. As a result, they often fail to bridge the gap between architectural reachability and semantic feasibility, leading to both false positives and false negatives.
Yuanpeng Wang, Zhineng Zhong, Zhenkai Liang, Ding Li 0001, Yao Guo 0001, Xiangqun Chen
LCTES2
2025 DPUaudit: DPU-assisted Pull-based Architecture for Near-Zero Cost System Auditing
abstract
System auditing frameworks are crucial for modern data center security, as they record system events to detect intrusions. However, existing software-based auditing frameworks are limited by their high runtime overhead. To address the limitations of software-based frameworks, researchers had proposed a hardware-based auditing framework that offloads log processing to isolated hardware. However, despite using powerful specialized hardware, this approach still suffers from high runtime overhead, which contradicts their efficiency goal. We have identified that the high overhead is due to the pushbased architecture, which involves operating a log sender on the monitored host. Consequently, the existing approach requires heavy software protection mechanisms to secure the log sender, resulting in high runtime overhead.In this paper, we propose a new DPU-assisted pull-based architecture called DPUaudit for hardware-based auditing, which achieves near-zero runtime overhead. Instead of using a log sender, DPUaudit utilizes DPU to actively pull system events from the monitored host. This eliminates the need for heavy mechanisms to handle and safeguard the log sender, achieving highly efficient system auditing. Experimental results show that, on average, DPUaudit only slows down applications on the monitored host by 2.1% for six mainstream data center applications under different workloads, which is at least one order of magnitude smaller than existing approaches, while still ensuring the integrity of audit logs.
Peng Jiang 0007, Hanlin Jiang, Ruizhe Huang, Hanwen Lei, Zhineng Zhong, Yuxin Ren 0001, Ning Jia 0004, Xinwei Hu, Yao Guo 0001, Xiangqun Chen, Ding Li 0001
HPCA5
2025 Orax: A Feedback-Driven Framework for Efficiently Solving Satisfiability Modulo Theories and Oracles
abstract
Recent advancements in Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solving have significantly improved formula-driven techniques for verification, testing, repair, and synthesis. However, addressing open programs that lack formal specifications, such as those relying on third-party libraries, remains a challenge. The problem of Satisfiability Modulo Theories and Oracles (SMTO) has emerged as a critical issue where oracles, representing components with observable behavior but unknown implementation, hinder SMT solver from reasoning. Existing approaches like Delphi and Saadhak struggle to effectively combine sufficient oracle mapping information that is crucial for feasible solution construction with the reasoning capabilities of the SMT solver, leading to inefficient solving of SMTO problems. In this work, we propose a novel solving framework for SMTO problems, Orax , which establishes an oracle mapping information feedback loop between the SMT solver and the oracle handler. In Orax , the SMT solver analyzes the deficiency in oracle mapping information it has and feeds this back to the oracle handler. The oracle handler then provides the most suitable additional oracle mapping information back to the SMT solver. Orax employs a dual-clustering strategy to select the initial oracle mapping information provided to the SMT solver and a relaxation-based method to analyze the deficiency in the oracle mapping information the SMT solver knows. Experimental results on the benchmark suite demonstrate that Orax outperforms existing methods, solving 118.37% and 13.83% more benchmarks than Delphi and Saadhak, respectively. In terms of efficiency, Orax achieves a PAR-2 score of 1.39, significantly exceeding Delphi’s score of 669.13 and Saadhak’s score of 173.31.
Zhineng Zhong, Ziqi Zhang 0017, Hanqin Guan, Ding Li 0001
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.1
2024 A novel reinforcement learning based Heap-based optimizer
Xuesen Ma, Zhineng Zhong, Yangyu Li, Dacheng Li, Yan Qiao 0001
Knowl. Based Syst.2
2023 Put Your Memory in Order: Efficient Domain-based Memory Isolation for WASM Applications
abstract
Memory corruption vulnerabilities can have more serious consequences in WebAssembly than in native applications. Therefore, we present \tool, the first WebAssembly runtime with memory isolation. Our insight is to use MPK hardware for efficient memory protection in WebAssembly. However, MPK and WebAssembly have different memory models: MPK protects virtual memory pages, while WebAssembly uses linear memory that has no pages. Mapping MPK APIs to WebAssembly causes memory bloating and low running efficiency. To solve this, we propose \acfdilm, which protects linear memory at function-level granularity. We implemented \acdilm into the official WebAssembly runtime to build \tool. Our evaluation shows that \tool can prevent memory corruption in real projects with a 1.77% average overhead and negligible memory cost.
Hanwen Lei, Ziqi Zhang 0017, Peng Jiang 0007, Zhineng Zhong, Ningyu He, Ding Li 0001, Yao Guo 0001, Xiangqun Chen
CCS5
2023 SymGX: Detecting Cross-boundary Pointer Vulnerabilities of SGX Applications via Static Symbolic Execution
abstract
Intel Security Guard Extensions (SGX) have shown effectiveness in critical data protection. Recent symbolic execution-based techniques reveal that SGX applications are susceptible to memory corruption vulnerabilities. While existing approaches focus on conventional memory corruption in ECalls of SGX applications, they overlook an important type of SGX dedicated vulnerability: cross-boundary pointer vulnerabilities. This vulnerability is critical for SGX applications since they heavily utilize pointers to exchange data between secure enclaves and untrusted environments. Unfortunately, none of the existing symbolic execution approaches can effectively detect cross-boundary pointer vulnerabilities due to the lack of an SGX-specific analysis model that properly handles three unique features of SGX applications: Multi-entry Arbitrary-order Execution, Stateful Execution, and Context-aware Pointers. To address such problems, we propose a new analysis model named Global State Transition Graph with Context Aware Pointers (GSTG-CAP) that simulates properties-preserving execution behaviors for SGX applications and drives symbolic execution for vulnerability detection. Based on GSTG-CAP, we build a novel symbolic execution-based vulnerability detector named SYMGX to detect cross-boundary pointer vulnerabilities. According to our evaluation, SYMGX can find 30 0-DAY vulnerabilities in 14 open-source projects, three of which have been confirmed by developers. SYMGX also outperforms two state-of-the-art tools, COIN and TeeRex, in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and accuracy.
Yuanpeng Wang, Ziqi Zhang 0017, Ningyu He, Zhineng Zhong, Shengjian Guo, Qinkun Bao, Ding Li 0001, Yao Guo 0001, Xiangqun Chen
CCS4