Yu Zou

Yu Zou

System Security Research Engineer

Hi, I’m Yu Zou (邹宇 in Chinese). I work at ByteDance as a system security research engineer. Before joining ByteDance, I worked as a research scientist at Alibaba DAMO Academy. I got my Ph.D. degree at the University of Central Florida, master degree at the University of Florida, and bachelor degree at the Beihang University.

My research interests encompass 1) high-performance, energy-efficient, and confidential heterogeneous computing; 2) secure computer architecture; 3) hardware security attack and defense; 4) trustworthy computer system; 5) AI for hardware; and 6) hardware for AI. I am highly enthusiastic about exploring innovative system designs that are feasible and robust enough to address urgent industrial challenges, thereby contributing to the solution of real industry technical issues. Additionally, I am an ardent advocate of automating everything. Anything that necessitates the involvement of repetitive human resources is a potential candidate for optimization though automation. I’m also a strong proponent of open-sourcing. Open-sourcing is not merely a community behavior; it is also a form of self-regulation that demands everything to be perfected to the extent that it can be made accessible to the public.

For more details about me, please check out my CV and Google Scholar.

🔥 News

  • 2024.10:  🎉 One of our papers was accepted and will be presented at ASPLOS’25. It proposes an innovative trusted execution environment (TEE) on COTS FPGAs. A collaboration work between Alibaba DAMO Academy and Tsinghua University.

📝 Publications

Conference Papers

  1. Static Badge Shadab, Rakin Muhammad, Yu Zou, and Mingjie Lin. “CTR+: A High-Performance Metadata Access Scheme for Secure Embedded Memory in Heterogeneous Computing Systems.” 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). IEEE, 2024.

  2. Static Badge Shadab, Rakin Muhammad, et al. “OMT: A run-time adaptive architectural framework for bonsai merkle tree-based secure authentication with embedded heterogeneous memory.” 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). IEEE, 2023.

  3. Static Badge Shadab, Rakin Muhammad, et al. “OMT: A Demand-Adaptive, Hardware-Targeted Bonsai Merkle Tree Framework for Embedded Heterogeneous Memory Platform.” Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. 2023.

  4. Static Badge Wang, Sheng, et al. “Operon: An encrypted database for ownership-preserving data management.” Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 15.12 (2022): 3332-3345.

  5. Static Badge Zou, Yu, Amro Awad, and Mingjie Lin. “Hermes: Hardware-efficient speculative dataflow architecture for bonsai merkle tree-based memory authentication.” 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). IEEE, 2021. [slides]

  6. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “FERMAT: fpga-accelerated heterogeneous computing platform near nvme storage.” 2021 IEEE 29th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM). IEEE, 2021.

  7. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “Massively simulating adiabatic bifurcations with FPGA to solve combinatorial optimization.” Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. 2020.

  8. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “Fast: A frequency-aware skewed merkle tree for fpga-secured embedded systems.” 2019 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). IEEE, 2019.

  9. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “Graph-Morphing: exploiting hidden parallelism of non-stencil computation in high-level synthesis.” Proceedings of the 56th Annual Design Automation Conference 2019. 2019.

  10. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “GridGAS: an I/O-efficient heterogeneous FPGA+ CPU computing platform for very large-scale graph analytics.” 2018 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT). IEEE, 2018.

  11. Static Badge Zou, Yu, and Mingjie Lin. “Very large-scale and node-heavy graph analytics with heterogeneous fpga+ cpu computing platform.” 2018 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). IEEE, 2018.

Journal Articles

  1. Static Badge Shadab, Rakin Muhammad, et al. “A secure computing system with hardware-efficient lazy bonsai merkle tree for fpga-attached embedded memory.” IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2023).

  2. Static Badge Shadab, Rakin Muhammad, et al. “Hmt: A hardware-centric hybrid bonsai merkle tree algorithm for high-performance authentication.” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems 22.4 (2023): 1-28.

  3. Static Badge Zou, Yu, Amro Awad, and Mingjie Lin. “DirectNVM: Hardware-accelerated NVMe SSDs for high-performance embedded computing.” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 21.1 (2022): 1-24.

  4. Static Badge Zou, Yu, et al. “ARES: Persistently secure non-volatile memory with processor-transparent and hardware-friendly integrity verification and metadata recovery.” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 21.1 (2022): 1-32.

Technical Reports

  1. Static Badge Wang, Gongyu, et al. “A research platform for custom memory cube.” Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications (ModSim). 2016.

📖 Education

  • 2017 - 2021, Ph.D. Computer Engineering @ University of Central Florida, Advisor: Mingjie Lin, Amro Awad
  • 2015 - 2017, M.S. Computer Engineering @ University of Florida, Advisor: Herman Lam, Alan D. George
  • 2011 - 2015, B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering @ Beihang University, Advisor: Yu Wang (Tsinghua University)

💻 Work Experience

  • 2024.01 - present, System Security Research Engineer @ ByteDance, CN
  • 2021.09 - 2024.01, Research Scientist @ Alibaba DAMO Academy, CN
  • 2017.05 - 2017.06, Intern @ Laboratory for Physical Sciences, US