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Qiang Liu

System Security Researcher

I am a PostDoc at EPFL in Switzerland, working with Prof. Mathias Payer in the HexHive laboratory.

Previously, I earned my PhD in 2023 from Zhejiang University (ZJU), advised by Prof. Yajin Zhou.

CV / / /

I investigate how to establish a chain of trust spanning the entire technology stack, from low-level software to user applications, and from individual computers to large-scale distributed and heterogeneous systems. To that end, I develop:

• Dynamic analysis platforms capable of reproducing and examining full-chain exploits,
• Vulnerability techniques, both pre-release detection and post-release mitigation, and
• Model-driven abstractions that unify software and hardware.

Ultimately, my goal is to builds toward end-to-end trustworthy computing systems.

Selected Publications

Truman: Constructing Device Behavior Models from OS Drivers to Fuzz Virtual Devices
Zheyu Ma, Qiang Liu, Zheming Li, Tingting Yin, Wende Tan, Chao Zhang, Mathias Payer
NDSS 2025

HYPERPILL: Fuzzing for Hypervisor-bugs by Leveraging the Hardware Virtualization Interface (Best Paper Award)
Alexander Bulekov, Qiang Liu, Manuel Egele, Mathias Payer
USENIX Security 2024

Tango: Extracting Higher-Order Feedback through State Inference (Best Paper Award)
Ahmad Hazimeh, Duo Xu, Qiang Liu (Corresponding Author), Yan Wang, Mathias Payer ACM RAID 2024

VIDEZZO: Dependency-aware Virtual Device Fuzzing
Qiang Liu, Flavio Toffalini, Yajin Zhou, Mathias Payer
IEEE S&P 2023

FIRMGUIDE: Boosting the Capability of Rehosting Embedded Linux Kernels through Model-Guided Kernel Execution
Qiang Liu, Cen Zhang (Co-first Author), Lin Ma, Muhui Jiang, Yajin Zhou, Lei *Wu, Wenbo Shen, Xiapu Luo, Yang Liu, Kui Ren
IEEE/ACM ASE 2021