Jason Zhijingcheng Yu
Hi! I am a PhD student at KISP Lab, School of Computing, National University of Singapore. I am working with Prof Prateek Saxena on system security. I am interested in the design of secure computer architectures with features such as full memory safety and fine-grained isolation. I have examined limitations of existing Trusted Execution Environment designs in terms of security and expressiveness. My prior work has included the uncovering of SmashEx, an attack that exploits vulnerabilities in asynchronous interfaces of SGX runtimes, and the creation of Elasticlave, an enclaved TEE design that enables safe and flexible inter-enclave memory sharing. The main projects I am currently working on are: Capstone, a capability-based architecture providing a unified foundation for building secure systems, and AnvilHDL, a hardware description language which enforces timing safety with dynamic timing contracts.
Check out my CV for more details about me!
- Email:
- yu dot zhi at comp dot nus dot edu dot sg
- Address:
- COM3-02-18, 11 Research Link, Singapore 119391
Education
- National University of Singapore
PhD in Computer Science, Aug 2019 — present
- Tsinghua University
BEng in Computer Science and Technology, Aug 2015 — Jul 2019
Publications (* indicates equal contributions, statistics available on Google Scholar)
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Anvil: A General-Purpose Timing-Safe Hardware Description Language
(under review)Jason Zhijingcheng Yu*, Aditya Ranjan Jha*, Umang Mathur, Trevor E. Carlson, Prateek Saxena
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Securing Mixed Rust with Hardware Capabilities
To appear at ACM CCS 2025Jason Zhijingcheng Yu*, Fangqi Han*, Kaustab Choudhury, Trevor E. Carlson, Prateek Saxena
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Caplification: Bridging Capability-Aware and Capability-Oblivious Software
To appear at ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies 2025Jason Zhijingcheng Yu, Mingkai Li, Trevor E. Carlson, Michael Swift, Prateek Saxena
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Capstone: A Capability-based Foundation for Trustless Secure Memory Access
In proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium 2023Jason Zhijingcheng Yu, Conrad Watt, Aditya Badole, Trevor E. Carlson, Prateek Saxena
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Elasticlave: An Efficient Memory Model for Enclaves
In proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium 2022Jason Zhijingcheng Yu, Shweta Shinde, Trevor E. Carlson, Prateek Saxena
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SmashEx: Smashing SGX Enclaves Using Exceptions
In proceedings of ACM CCS 2021Jinhua Cui*, Jason Zhijingcheng Yu*, Shweta Shinde, Prateek Saxena, Zhiping Cai
Talks
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August 2023Capstone: A Capability-based Foundation for Trustless Secure Memory AccessAt USENIX Security Symposium 2023 (Anaheim, USA)
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August 2022Elasticlave: An Efficient Memory Model for EnclavesAt USENIX Security Symposium 2022 (Boston, USA)
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December 2021Elasticlave: An Efficient Memory Model for Enclaves(as part of tutorial From EDA to TEEs, Security Tools for Understanding and Mitigating Side-Channel and Fault Injection Attacks)At Design Automation Conference 2021 (San Francisco, USA)
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November 2021SmashEx: Smashing SGX Enclaves Using ExceptionsAt ACM CCS 2021 (virtual)
Posters
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May 2025An Architecture Design for Expressive SecurityAt RISC-V Summit Europe 2025 (Paris, France)
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November 2022SmashEx: Smashing SGX Enclaves Using ExceptionsAt ACM CCS 2022 (Los Angeles, USA)
CVE Credits
Teaching
- Introduction to Computer Security (CS3235, Spring 2022)
- Introduction to Computer Security (CS3235, Spring 2021)
- Systems Security (CS5231, Fall 2020)
- Data Structures and Algorithms (CS2010, Spring 2020)
Service
- NUS CS Department Security Area Search Committee student member (2025)