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Qiang Liu#
PostDoc in System Security at EPFL.
On the academic job market (2025-2026)
Open to faculty position in system security, AI system security, computer security, cybersecurity, etc.
CV | Google Scholar | GitHub | Email
Research Vision#
I propose the OME framework to Observe, Model, and Enforce the trustworthiness of computer systems at runtime. Grounded in dynamic analysis, OME treats trust as a measurable property of execution rather than a static design assumption. I currently apply it to low-level system software, such as the Linux kernel and hypervisors, within a single machine. The same observation, modeling, and enforcement pipeline can scale to higher-level components (e.g., interpreters, browsers, and AI agents) and to distributed and heterogeneous environments (e.g., xPU, remote resources, and network protocols).
Beyond dynamic analysis, I aim to take multiple complementary approaches to support the full lifecycle of system trust, such as secure programming languages such as Rust, large-scale static analysis, secure boot and attestation, and minimal recovery systems, from build to deployment, execution, and recovery.
Ultimately, my goal is to make computer systems measurably trustworthy, difficult to compromise, and secure to rely on for different classes of stakeholders.
AI agents show strong potential to automate many forms of human effort that were previously unavoidable in security research. In parallel, I am studying their design principles and performance benchmarks.
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*, Yan Wang, Mathias Payer
*Marked as Corresponding Author
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*, Lin Ma, Muhui Jiang, Yajin Zhou, Lei
Wu, Wenbo Shen, Xiapu Luo, Yang Liu, Kui Ren
*Co-first authors
IEEE/ACM ASE 2021
Selected Services#
Program Committees: USENIX Security 2025, IEEE/ACM ASE 2025
Reviewer: ACM TIFS, ACM CSUR, ACM TOSEM
Biography#
Qiang Liu is a postdoc at EPFL, working with Prof. Mathias Payer in the HexHive laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in 2023 from Zhejiang University (ZJU) under the guidance of Prof. Yajin Zhou. His research interest is system security that seeks to establish 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, grounded in a deep understanding of hardware and software. His work has been recognized at all the top security conferences: IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, and ISOC NDSS. He received the Best Paper Awards at USENIX Security'24 and ACM RAID'24. He is also serving on the program committee for IEEE/ACM ASE'25 and USENIX Security'25 and has reviewed for journals including IEEE TIFS, ACM CSUR, and ACM TOSEM.
