Rate My Professor Zhi Zhang

Zhi Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering within the School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing at the University of Western Australia. He commenced at UWA as a Lecturer in January 2023 and advanced to Senior Lecturer in August 2025. Previously, Zhang served as Research Scientist from April to December 2022 and Postdoctoral Fellow from November 2020 to April 2022 at CSIRO's Data61, as well as Postdoctoral Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology from August to November 2020. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales in February 2021 for his thesis on Software-only Rowhammer Attacks and Countermeasures. Additionally, he holds a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Peking University completed in 2014 and a Bachelor of Science in Communication Engineering from Sichuan University in 2011.

Zhang's academic interests center on hardware security, system security, rowhammer, and adversarial artificial intelligence. His contributions to these areas have earned notable accolades, including the USENIX Security Distinguished Paper Award in 2024, Honorable Mention Paper Award in 2025, ASIACCS Distinguished Paper Award in 2023, UNSW Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses in 2021 recognizing the top 10% of theses, CSIRO’s SCS Program Collaboration Award and Science Excellence Award in 2022, UNSW International Postgraduate Award and CSIRO Top-up PhD Scholarship from 2017 to 2020, Peking University Scholarship in 2012, and National Scholarship in China in 2009. Prominent publications encompass “Achilles: A Formal Framework of Leaking Secrets from Signature Schemes via Rowhammer” (USENIX Security Symposium 2025), “HyperHammer: Breaking Free from KVM-Enforced Isolation” (ASPLOS 2025), “THEMIS: Towards Practical Intellectual Property Protection for Post-Deployment On-Device Deep Learning Models” (USENIX Security 2025), “UncoreBleed: AEX-Free, High-Resolution, and Low-Noise Side-Channel Attacks on SGX Enclaved Execution” (USENIX Security 2026), “Fish and Chips: On the Root Causes of Co-Located Website-Fingerprinting Attacks” (IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 2026), and “ExMOP: Extensible protocol reverse engineering framework based on Multi-objective OPtimization” (Computers & Security 2026). These works underscore his impact on developing robust defenses against advanced security threats in computing systems. He is also affiliated with the UWA Defence and Security Institute.