Zizhan Zheng

Zizhan Zheng
Tulane University | TU · Computer Science

PhD

About

64
Publications
5,060
Reads
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1,187
Citations
Citations since 2017
26 Research Items
608 Citations
2017201820192020202120222023020406080100120
2017201820192020202120222023020406080100120
2017201820192020202120222023020406080100120
2017201820192020202120222023020406080100120
Introduction
Zizhan Zheng currently works in Computer Science at Tulane University. Zizhan does research in Networks, Cybersecurity, and Machine Learning.
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - July 2016
University of California, Davis
Position
  • Associate Specialist
September 2010 - August 2014
The Ohio State University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2005 - June 2010
The Ohio State University
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (64)
Article
With MIMO and enhanced beamforming features, IEEE 802.11ay is poised to create the next generation of mmWave WLANs that can provide over 100 Gbps data rate. However, beamforming between densely deployed APs and clients incurs unacceptable overhead. On the other hand, the absence of up-to-date beamforming information restricts the diversity gains av...
Preprint
Full-text available
In a federated learning (FL) system, malicious participants can easily embed backdoors into the aggregated model while maintaining the model's performance on the main task. To this end, various defenses, including training stage aggregation-based defenses and post-training mitigation defenses, have been proposed recently. While these defenses obtai...
Preprint
Submodularity is an important property of set functions and has been extensively studied in the literature. It models set functions that exhibit a diminishing returns property, where the marginal value of adding an element to a set decreases as the set expands. This notion has been generalized to considering sequence functions, where the order of a...
Article
Stealthy attacks have become a major threat for cyber security. Previous works in this direction fail to capture the practical resource constraints and mainly focus on one-node settings. In this paper, we propose a two-player game-theoretic model including a system of multiple independent nodes, a stealthy attacker and an observable defender. In ou...
Article
Full-text available
While mobile apps often need to transmit sensitive information out to support various functionalities, they may also abuse the privilege by leaking the data to unauthorized third parties. This makes us question: Is the given transmission required to fulfill the app functionality? In this paper, we make the first attempt to automatically identify su...
Preprint
Full-text available
Moving target defense has emerged as a critical paradigm of protecting a vulnerable system against persistent and stealthy attacks. To protect a system, a defender proactively changes the system configurations to limit the exposure of security vulnerabilities to potential attackers. In doing so, the defender creates asymmetric uncertainty and compl...
Preprint
Recent works on adversarial examples for image classification focus on directly modifying pixels with minor perturbations. The small perturbation requirement is imposed to ensure the generated adversarial examples being natural and realistic to humans, which, however, puts a curb on the attack space thus limiting the attack ability and transferabil...
Preprint
Network function virtualization (NFV) is an emerging design paradigm that replaces physical middlebox devices with software modules running on general purpose commodity servers. While gradually transitioning to NFV, Internet service providers face the problem of where to introduce NFV in order to make the most benefit of that; here, we measure the...
Preprint
Full-text available
As an effective approach to thwarting advanced attacks, moving target defense (MTD) has been applied to various domains. Previous works on MTD, however, mainly focus on deciding the sequence of system configurations to be used and have largely ignored the equally important timing problem. Given that both the migration cost and attack time vary over...
Preprint
Adversarial examples are perturbed inputs designed to fool machine learning models. Most recent works on adversarial examples for image classification focus on directly modifying pixels with minor perturbations. A common requirement in all these works is that the malicious perturbations should be small enough (measured by an $L_p$ norm for some $p$...
Preprint
Full-text available
We study multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, in which the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action, in a setting where the graph may vary over time and is never fully revealed to the decision maker. We show that when the feedback graphs are undirected, the original Thompson Sampling achieves the...
Article
Full-text available
Recent works show that power-proportional data centers can save energy cost by dynamically adjusting active servers based on real time workload. The data center activates servers when the workload increases and transfers servers to sleep mode during periods of low load. In this paper, we investigate the right-sizing problem with heterogeneous data...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We propose a Stackelberg game model for Moving Target Defense (MTD) where the defender periodically switches the state of a security sensitive resource to make it difficult for the attacker to identify the real configurations of the resource. Our model can incorporate various information structures. In this work, we focus on the worst-case scenario...
Article
Full-text available
Mobile operating systems adopt permission systems to protect system integrity and user privacy. In this work, we propose INSPIRED, an intention-aware dynamic mediation system for mobile operating systems with privacy-preserving capability. When a security or privacy sensitive behavior is triggered, INSPIRED automatically infers the underlying progr...
Conference Paper
An essential step for achieving multiplexing gain in MIMO downlink systems is to collect accurate channel state information (CSI) from the users. Traditionally, CSIs have to be collected before any data can be transmitted. Such a sequential scheme incurs a large feedback overhead, which substantially limits the multiplexing gain especially in a net...
Article
An essential step for achieving multiplexing gain in MIMO downlink systems is to collect accurate channel state information (CSI) from the users. Traditionally, CSIs have to be collected before any data can be transmitted. Such a sequential scheme incurs a large feedback overhead, which substantially limits the multiplexing gain especially in a net...
Article
Full-text available
Mobile applications (apps) often transmit sensitive data through network with various intentions. Some transmissions are needed to fulfill the app's functionalities. However, transmissions with malicious receivers may lead to privacy leakage and tend to behave stealthily to evade detection. The problem is twofold: how does one unveil sensitive tran...
Article
Full-text available
Cybersecurity is increasingly threatened by advanced and persistent attacks. As these attacks are often designed to disable a system (or a critical resource, e.g., a user account) repeatedly, it is crucial for the defender to keep updating its security measures to strike a balance between the risk of being compromised and the cost of security updat...
Article
Full-text available
The exponential growth of mobile devices has raised concerns about sensitive data leakage. In this paper, we make the first attempt to identify suspicious location-related HTTP transmission flows from the user's perspective, by answering the question: Is the transmission user-intended? In contrast to previous network-level detection schemes that ma...
Article
Full-text available
The proliferation of Social Network Sites (SNSs) has greatly reformed the way of information dissemination, but also provided a new venue for hosts with impure motivations to disseminate malicious information. Social trust is the basis for information dissemination in SNSs. Malicious hosts judiciously and dynamically make the balance between mainta...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Stealthy attacks are a major threat to cyber security. In practice, both attackers and defenders have resource constraints that could limit their capabilities. Hence, to develop robust defense strategies, a promising approach is to utilize game theory to understand the fundamental trade-offs involved. Previous works in this direction, however, main...
Article
Full-text available
Stealthy attacks are a major threat to cyber security. In practice, both attackers and defenders have resource constraints that could limit their capabilities. Hence, to develop robust defense strategies, a promising approach is to utilize game theory to understand the fundamental tradeoffs involved. Previous works in this direction, however, mainl...
Article
Full-text available
One key requirement for storage clouds is to be able to retrieve data quickly. Recent system measurements have shown that the data retrieving delay in storage clouds is highly variable, which may result in a long latency tail. One crucial idea to improve the delay performance is to retrieve multiple data copies by using parallel downloading threads...
Article
Full-text available
The smart grid is envisioned to significantly enhance the efficiency of energy consumption, by utilizing two-way communication channels between consumers and operators. For example, operators can opportunistically leverage the delay tolerance of energy demands in order to balance the energy load over time, and hence, reduce the total operational co...
Article
Full-text available
The accelerated adoption of EVs in the last few years has raised concerns that the power grid can get overloaded when a large number of EVs are charged simultaneously. A promising direction is to implement large scale automated scheduling of EV charging at public facilities, by exploiting the time elasticity of charging requests. In this work, we s...
Article
Full-text available
With increasing popularity of media enabled hand-helds and their integration with the in-vehicle entertainment systems, the need for high data-rate services for mobile users on the go is evident. This ever-increasing demand of data is constantly surpassing what cellular networks can economically support. Large-scale Wireless LANs (WLANs) can provid...
Article
Full-text available
We study the problem of maximizing the information in a wireless sensor network with unreliable links. We consider a sensor network with a tree topology, where the root corresponds to the sink, and the rest of the network detects an event and transmits data to the sink. We formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that maximizes the informatio...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The smart grid is envisioned to significantly enhance the efficiency of energy consumption, by utilizing two-way communication channels between consumers and operators. For example, operators can opportunistically leverage the delay tolerance of energy demands in order to balance the energy load over time, and hence, reduce the total operational co...
Article
Full-text available
In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), unlicensed users are allowed to access the licensed spectrum when it is not currently being used by primary users (PUs). In this paper, we study the throughput maximization problem for a multi-channel CRN where each SU can only sense a limited number of channels. We show that this problem is strongly NP-hard, and...
Article
Full-text available
The smart grid is envisioned to significantly enhance the efficiency of energy consumption, by utilizing two-way communication channels between consumers and operators. For example, operators can opportunistically leverage the delay tolerance of energy demands in order to balance the energy load over time, and hence, reduce the total operational co...
Article
Full-text available
In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), secondary users (SUs) are allowed to opportunistically access the unused/under-utilized channels of primary users (PUs). To utilize spectrum resources efficiently, an auction scheme is often applied where an operator serves as an auctioneer and accepts spectrum requests from SUs. Most existing works on spectrum a...
Article
Full-text available
Vehicular Internet access via open WiFi access points (APs) has been demonstrated to be a feasible solution to provide opportunistic data service to moving vehicles. Using an in situ deployment, however, such a solution does not provide performance guarantees due to unpredictable intermittent connectivity. On the other hand, a solution that tries t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We study the utility maximization problem for data collection in sensor networks subject to a deadline constraint, where the data on a selected subset of nodes are collected through a routing tree rooted at a sink subject to the 1-hop interference model. Our problem can be viewed as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem with binary decisions...
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive Radio Networks allow unlicensed users to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum without causing disruptive interference to the primary users (PUs). One of the main challenges in CRNs is the ability to detect PU transmissions. Recent works have suggested the use of secondary user (SU) cooperation over individual sensing to improve...
Article
Renewable energy enables sensor networks with the capability to recharge and provide perpetual data services. Due to low recharging rates and the dynamics of renewable energy such as solar and wind power, providing services without interrup- tions caused by battery runouts is nontrivial. Most environment monitoring applications require data collect...
Conference Paper
An autonomic middleware performs adaptive computations on the fly that bring benefits to the system while consuming additional resources such as CPU and memory. These computations can sometimes interfere with normal business functions of the system due to resource competition, especially when under heavy load. In this paper, we propose an approach...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
With increasing popularity of media enabled hand-helds, the need for high data-rate services for mobile users is evident. Large-scale Wireless LANs (WLANs) can provide such a service, but they are expensive to deploy and maintain. Open WLAN access-points (APs), on the other hand, need no new deployments, but can offer only opportunistic services wi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The AutoWitness project aims to deter, detect, and track theft of everyday objects using a combination of ultra low-power mobile tags and a wide-area network of static anchors. Key research challenges include dramatically driving down the cost and size of tags and increasing their lifetime, discriminating between normal activities and theft using m...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Vehicular Internet access via open WLAN access points (APs) has been demonstrated to be a feasible solution to provide opportunistic data service to moving vehicles. Using an in situ deployment, however, such a solution does not provide worst-case performance guarantees due to unpredictable intermittent connectivity. On the other hand, a solution t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Tracking of movements such as that of people, animals, vehicles, or of phenomena such as fire, can be achieved by deploying a wireless sensor network. So far only prototype systems have been deployed and hence the issue of scale has not become critical. Real-life deployments, however, will be at large scale and achieving this scale will become proh...
Article
In-network caching is a useful technique for reducing latency and retransmission overhead of lost packets for reliable data delivery in wireless networks. However, in-network caching is challenging to implement in memory constrained devices such as RFIDs and sensors, and also in Wireless LAN (WLAN) gateways for large-scale deployments. In this pape...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Renewable energy enables sensor networks with the capabil- ity to recharge and provide perpetual data services. Due to low recharging rates and the dynamics of renewable energy such as solar and wind power, providing services without interruptions caused by battery runouts is non-trivial. Most environment monitoring applications require data collec...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Communication between arbitrary pairs of nodes has become critical to support in emerging sensor networking applications. Traditional routing techniques for multi-hop wireless networks either require high control overhead in computing and maintaining routes, or may lead to unbounded route-stretch. In order to bound the route-stretch, we propose a d...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In-network caching is a useful technique for reducing latency and retransmission overhead of lost packets for reliable data delivery in wireless networks. However, in-network caching is challenging to implement in memory constrained devices such as RFIDs and sensors, and also in Wireless LAN (WLAN) gateways for large-scale deployments. In this pape...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Autonomic computing middleware is a promising way to enable middleware based systems to cope with the rapid and continuous changes in the era of Internet. Technically, there have been three fundamental and challenging capabilities to an autonomic computing middleware, including how to monitor, reason and control middleware platform and applications...
Article
This paper presents a novel coding approach for both single and multi-hop wireless networks, which exploits the spacial diversity of wireless networks to reduce the total packets transmitted to improve throughput. For wireless LANs, access points perform XOR coding on outgoing packets according to which packets have been received or overheard. To f...

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