Zheng Zhong Ph.D. candidate Department of Computer Science Purdue University Email: zhong183@purdue.edu

About Me

I am a final-year PhD student at Purdue CS, advised by Prof. Dave Tian. I also work closely with Prof. Arslan Khan. My research focuses on binary program analysis and hardening, particularly for software with rich mathematical semantics, including compiled deep neural network programs and control firmware for embedded systems. During summer 2026, I was a security research intern at Palo Alto Networks.

Before joining Purdue, I completed my MPhil degree at CUHK CSE in 2020, working with Prof. Ming-Chang Yang and Prof. James Cheng. I interned at Alibaba Group in 2019. I received my BEng degree at Sun Yat-sen University in 2018, where I was awarded the National Scholarship in 2015.

I am currently on the job market and seeking opportunities in industry.

Publications

Conference Papers

• Hardening Deep Neural Network Binaries against Reverse Engineering Attacks
  Zheng Zhong, Ruoyu Wu, Junpeng Wan, Muqi Zou, and Dave (Jing) Tian.
  Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'25).
  

  [paper] [code]

• Yugong: Geo-Distributed Data and Job Placement at Scale
  Yuzhen Huang, Yingjie Shi, Zheng Zhong, Yihui Feng, James Cheng, Jiwei Li, Haochuan Fan, Chao Li, Tao Guan, and Jingren Zhou.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 12, Number 12, 2019 (VLDB'19).
  

  [paper]

Preprints

• Exploiting PDF Obfuscation in LLMs, arXiv, and More
  Zhongtang Luo, Jianting Zhang, and Zheng Zhong.
  Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2026.
  

  [paper]

Services

Reviewer

• IEEE TIFS '24, IEEE TDSC '26

External Reviewer

• IEEE S&P '25 '26

Experience

Internships

• Security Research Intern
  Palo Alto Networks, Santa Clara Jun 2026 – Sep 2026
  Improved and standardized YARA malware-family descriptions using malware-vendor evidence, LLM-based inference, and agentic web-search verification.
• Engineering Intern
  Alibaba Group, Beijing Dec 2018 – May 2019
  Worked on improving the performance of MaxCompute by cache optimization and job scheduling.

Teaching Assistant

• Purdue CS426: Computer Security Spring 2026
• Purdue CS536: Data Communication and Computer Networks Fall 2024
• Purdue CS240: Programming in C Spring 2023
• Purdue CS580: Algorithm Design, Analysis, and Implementation Fall 2022
• CUHK CSCI1020: Hands-on Introduction to C++ Spring 2020