2016 -- 2020

Southeast University (985 University in China) -- Nanjing, China

B.Eng in Information Engineering

GPA: 3.88/4, Ranked as 7/255

2020 -- 2023

Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Ranked Top 3 in China) -- Shanghai, China

M.S in Cyber Security

GPA: 3.88/4, Ranked as 2/28

2023 -- Now

Nanyang Technological University -- Singapore, Singapore

Ph.D. in Math

Provost Graduate Award (NTU Premium Scholarship)

CGPA: 4.75/5.0

Sep 2020 -- Mar 2023

Lab of Cryptology and Computer Security (LoCCS)

Supervisor: Dawu Gu (Distinguished Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University).

-- I graduated from Southeast University with a B.Eng in information engineering and joined the Lab of Cryptology and Computer Security in September 2020. During the last 2 years, I mainly focused on the side-channel analysis of IoT devices and cryptography.

-- In 2021, I was assigned as the group leader of the "wireless side-channel analysis" and reproduced the "Screaming Channel Attack" proposed in 2018. To enhance the original wireless side-channel analysis method, I proposed a new method using a self-made repeater and signal processing methods, which has been concluded in the paper 'Wireless Side-channel Analysis Method Based on Repeater'.

-- I have research experience in machine learning and cross-device side-channel analysis. I cooperated with my senior Mr.Pei Cao, built the signal sampling system, and published the paper 'AL-PA: cross-device profiled side-channel attack using adversarial learning' as the second author in 2022. In this paper, we use the adversarial learning to recover the secret key of the device

-- I took part in the project 'ATHENa' and accomplished the LWC side-channel security evaluation on Ascon. In this project, I used power side-channel analysis to inspect whether there is any information leakage in the lightweight cryptography algorithm Ascon. The evaluation report of the Ascon has been accepted by the official websites of 'ATHENa'.

August 2023 -- Now

SYmmetric cryptography and machine Learning Lab (SyLLab)

Supervisor: PEYRIN Thomas (Professor, Nanyang Technological University).

-- I focused on the verification of differential trails of block ciphers and invented the verification tool, the Trail-Estimator. This tool can judge the validity of trails and give the comprehensive probability distribution of trails.

-- Meanwhile, I did research on AI network security against the Bit-Flip Attack.

1. Trail-Estimator: An Automated Verifier for Differential Trails in Block Ciphers

Thomas Peyrin, Quan Quan Tan, Hongyi Zhang* (Corresponding Author), Chunning Zhou.

FSE 2026: Fast Software Encrytion

2. AL-PA: cross-device profiled side-channel attack using adversarial learning

Pei Cao, Hongyi Zhang, Dawu Gu, Yan Lu, and Yidong Yuan.

DAC 2022: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference

3. Wireless Side-channel Analysis Method Based on Repeater

ZHANG H Y, GU D W, ZHANG C, LU Y, YUAN Y D.

Journal of Cryptologic Research, 2022,9(1):175-188.

4. Wireless Side-Channel Analysis Method Based on Spectral Addition

ZHANG H Y, GU D W, Cao P, Qu S P, Li X W.

Journal of Cryptologic Research, 2023,10(4):862-878.

C / C++

PYTHON

SQL

JAVA

javascript

PHP

Verilog

Circuit Design