Jie Zhou

Email: jie.zhou@gwu.edu
Office: SEH 4590

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the George Washington University. I received my PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, advised by John Criswell. Before Rochester, I got my Bachelor's degree from Xiamen University.

I do Systems Research with a focus on systems and software security. I advocate for language-based security: programming languages are the direct medium through which programmers express their ideas, and compilers are the direct medium that translate these expressions to the ultimately executed machine code. I believe methods oriented around languages and compilers solve computer security concerns in a fundamental manner.

Be alert, for your software is buggy and full of vulnerabilities!

Prospective Students: I am looking for students. If you are interested, please read this.

Selected Publications

OOPSLA

Fat Pointers for Temporal Memory Safety of C

Jie Zhou, John Criswell, and Michael Hicks

In Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 7, Issue OOPSLA1 , Cascais, Portugal, 2023

PDF Video Code Bib

@inproceedings{CheckedCTemporal:OOPSLA23,
  author = {Zhou, Jie and Criswell, John and Hicks, Michael},
  title = {{Fat Pointers for Temporal Memory Safety of C}},
  year = {2023},
  issue_date = {April 2023},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {7},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3586038},
  doi = {10.1145/3586038},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 7, Issue OOPSLA1},
  conf = {ACM International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications},
  articleno = {86},
  numpages = {32},
  keywords = {Fat Pointers, Checked C, Temporal Memory Safety},
  location = {Cascais, Portugal},
}

USENIX Security

Silhouette: Efficient Protected Shadow Stacks for Embedded Systems

Jie Zhou, Yufei Du, Zhuojia Shen, Lele Ma, John Criswell, and Robert J. Walls

In The 29th USENIX Security Symposium , Virtual, 2020

PDF Video Code Bib

@inproceedings{Silhouette:Sec20,
  author = {Zhou, Jie and Du, Yufei and Shen, Zhuojia and Ma, Lele and Criswell, John and Walls, Robert J.},
  title = {Silhouette: Efficient Protected Shadow Stacks for Embedded Systems},
  booktitle = {The 29th {USENIX} Security Symposium},
  year = {2020},
  isbn = {978-1-939133-17-5},
  pages = {1219--1236},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/zhou-jie},
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  location = {Virtual},
}

Teaching

Fall 2024:	CSCI 4907/6545 Software Security

Program Committees

2025:	USENIX Sec
2024:	CCS, SecDev
2023:	SecDev, PLDI SRC
2021:	LLVM Dev.