Weijie Liu
I am an Associate Professor at Nankai University. Previously, I served as a technical expert at Ant Group (2022–2024) and Tencent (2018).
I received my Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from Wuhan University in 2012 and 2018, respectively, under the supervision of Prof. Lina Wang. During my doctoral studies, I visited Singapore Management University and worked with Prof. Debin Gao and Prof. Mike Reiter. I later completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship and spent one year as a Research Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, working with Prof. XiaoFeng Wang and Prof. Haixu Tang.
Research
My research focuses on building secure and trustworthy computing systems across the software–hardware stack. It connects application isolation, TEE-enabled systems software, and processor-level security through the following three areas.
01 Secure Sandboxing and Runtime Isolation
I design security sandboxes and runtime isolation mechanisms for untrusted workloads. My work includes sandboxing CI workloads with gVisor [S&P 22], identifying and mitigating container-escape vectors caused by path misresolution and cross-boundary desynchronization [CCS 23, NDSS 26], and characterizing trust-boundary vulnerabilities in secure container systems [FSE 26].
02 Trusted Systems Software and Hardware-Software Co-Design
I build systems software that leverages trusted hardware to protect sensitive applications and data, spanning library operating systems, secure storage, enclave services, and confidential-computing platforms. I contributed to Occlum, an open-source library OS for Intel SGX that has been deployed in Alipay, and Asterinas, a Rust-based, Linux-compatible operating system. I also developed a secure, resource-efficient, and pluggable Kubernetes architecture for multi-tenancy [EuroSys 26]. My work uncovered eviction attacks against SGX-PFS and introduced sync-atomic secure storage [FAST 25], alongside research on in-enclave policy verification, user isolation, privacy-preserving analytics, preemption defense, enclave-assisted secure computation [DSN 21, TDSC 23, CLOUD 21, ISPA 20, CHES 26], and hardware-event-based covert-channel detection in cloud environments [SCN 16].
03 Processor and Microarchitectural Security
I investigate microarchitectural attacks and hardware-assisted defenses. My work covers VMFUNC-based time blurring [ESORICS 17], virtualization-based controlled-channel detection [ICA3PP 18], LBR-assisted virtual machine introspection [TIFS 22], and practical Rowhammer attacks [Tsinghua ST 19].
News
| Jul 13, 2026 | CHES paper accepted! |
|---|---|
| Jul 1, 2026 | FSE! |
| Dec 14, 2025 | EuroSys! |
| Dec 13, 2025 | NDSS! |
| Mar 1, 2025 | FAST! |
| Jan 7, 2025 | Get a CVE-2024-55528 in Alibaba Pouch. |
| Oct 1, 2024 | CVE-2024-41228 was discovered by us. |
| Aug 30, 2024 | Get a CVE-2024-41666 in CI/CD platforms. |