Ziming Zhao
(he/him)
Associate Professor
Research interests
- Security and privacy
- Systems and networking
Education
- PhD in Computer Science, Arizona State University
- MS in Cryptography, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications — China
- BE in Automation, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications — China
Biography
Ziming Zhao is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.
Zhao’s passion for systems and software security, network and web security, and human-centric security is motivated by one simple truism: hacking is fun. From that fact has grown a career that has included more than 70 publications, six co-chair assignments, four editorships, three patents, a book on peer-to-peer technology principles, and an NSF CAREER Award. His research focuses on securing systems in practical ways.
That research has earned Zhao a Test-of-Time award at ACM SACMAT 2024, as well as best and distinguished paper awards from several prestigious conferences, including USENIX Security 2019, ACM AsiaCCS 2022, ACM CODASPY 2014, and ITU Kaleidoscope 2016.
Zhao also explores his love for security and hacking through capture the flag (CTF) cybersecurity competitions in which competitors race to secure or exploit system vulnerabilities. He founded and advised two such CTF teams at the University at Buffalo. Upon joining Khoury College in 2024, he began teaching a software security course designed around hands-on CTF competitions.
Zhao enjoys playing Madden with his children in his spare time.
Recent publications
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Defending Against Membership Inference Attacks on Iteratively Pruned Deep Neural Networks
Citation: Jing Shang, Jian Wang, Kailun Wang, Jiqiang Liu, Nan Jiang, Md. Armanuzzaman, Ziming Zhao . (2025). Defending Against Membership Inference Attacks on Iteratively Pruned Deep Neural Networks NDSS. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/defending-against-membership-inference-attacks-on-iteratively-pruned-deep-neural-networks/ -
TokenScout: Early Detection of Ethereum Scam Tokens via Temporal Graph Learning
Citation: Cong Wu , Jing Chen , Ziming Zhao , Kun He , Guowen Xu, Yueming Wu , Haijun Wang, Hongwei Li , Yang Liu , Yang Xiang . (2024). TokenScout: Early Detection of Ethereum Scam Tokens via Temporal Graph Learning CCS, 956-970. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3690234 -
InsectACIDE: Debugger-Based Holistic Asynchronous CFI for Embedded System
Citation: Yujie Wang, Cailani Lemieux Mack, Xi Tan , Ning Zhang , Ziming Zhao , Sanjoy K. Baruah, Bryan C. Ward. (2024). InsectACIDE: Debugger-Based Holistic Asynchronous CFI for Embedded System RTAS, 360-372. https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS61025.2024.00036 -
SHERLOC: Secure and Holistic Control-Flow Violation Detection on Embedded Systems
Citation: Xi Tan , Ziming Zhao . (2023). SHERLOC: Secure and Holistic Control-Flow Violation Detection on Embedded Systems CCS, 1332-1346. https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3623077 -
Return-to-Non-Secure Vulnerabilities on ARM Cortex-M TrustZone: Attack and Defense
Citation: Zheyuan Ma, Xi Tan , Lukasz Ziarek, Ning Zhang , Hongxin Hu, Ziming Zhao . (2023). Return-to-Non-Secure Vulnerabilities on ARM Cortex-M TrustZone: Attack and Defense DAC, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1109/DAC56929.2023.10247972
