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zijie-zhao
Scholar
I am Zijie Zhao, a third year PhD student in the PL/FM/SE group at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign advised by Lingming Zhang.
I'm most passionate about fuzzing and broadly interested in software engineering and testing, with a focus on combining traditional techniques with powerful, rapidly evolving LLMs.
I obtained my bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science at University of California San Diego.
Publication
KNighter: Transforming Static Analysis with LLM-Synthesized Checkers
Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Zichen Xie, Haoyu Li, Lingming Zhang
Preprint
Kernelgpt: Enhanced kernel fuzzing via large language models
Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Lingming Zhang
ASPLOS 2025
WaVe: a verifiably secure WebAssembly sandboxing runtime
Evan Johnson, Evan Laufer, Zijie Zhao, Shravan Narayan, Stefan Savage, Deian Stefan, Fraser Brown
IEEE S&P 2023 🏆 Distinguished Paper Award
Industry Experience
Graduate Intern
- Built new features for MoveSmith to improve its fuzzing capabilities.
- Implemented an LLM-based Move program generator to automatically generate diverse tests for new language features.
Graduate Intern
- Built a source code level fuzzer MoveSmith for the Aptos Move Compiler and VM stack.
- MoveSmith is able to generate complex Move programs with high valid rate by respecting rules for language features like ability constraints, lifetime, and ownership.
- To date, MoveSmith has found 50+ bugs in both the compile and the VM.
Software Engineer Intern
- Used React.js, MobX.js, and Bootstrap to build complex web-based financial applications.
- Maintained existing server-rendered applications built by Ruby on Rails.
- Reduced page loading time from 18s to 2s and data saving time from 100s to 15s.
- Optimized over 2400 SQL queries into 600 queries.
Teaching Experience
- UIUC CS 527: Topics in Software Engineering
- UIUC CS 427: Software Engineering I
- UCSD CSE 127: Intro to Computer Security
- UCSD CSE 21: Mathematics for Algorithms and Systems
- UCSD CSE 12: Basic Data Structures and OOD
- UCSD CSE 11: Introduction to Java
Selected Bugs
A selection of bugs that my work found:
- Firefox
- CVE-2020-26960 (received $1,000 bug bounty)
- Linux kernel
- CVE-2024-23851, CVE-2023-52429, CVE-2024-23848, CVE-2024-23850, CVE-2024-25739, CVE-2024-23849, CVE-2024-25740, CVE-2024-26655, CVE-2024-25741, CVE-2024-43825, CVE-2024-50103
- Aptos Move