IPADS

Associate Professor
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai, P.R.China
Zip/Postal Code: 200240
Email: zchua at sjtu dot edu dot cn

I am an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I received my Ph.D. degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020, advised by Prof. Yubin Xia, Prof. Haibo Chen, and Prof. Binyu Zang. My research area include operating systems, architectures, hardware/software co-design and the systems/architectures for LLM.

• CS3601 Operating System （2022 fall, 2023 fall, 2024 fall)
• EI6711 Advanced Operating System （2024 spring, 2025 spring)

• TPC of APSys 2025
• TPC of SysTEX 2025
• TPC of SIGOPS ChinaSys 2024
• Transaction Reviewer of Journal of Systems Architecture: Embedded Software Design
• Transaction Reviewer of CCF Transactions on High Performance Computing

HW/SW Co-Design for System Isolation

I use hardware-software co-design to build a more efficient isolation framework for the operating system. For kernel-level isolation, I propose ISA-Grid[ISCA'23] to construct bit-level isolation domains for instructions and registers, which isolate different kernel components and kernel modules. I also propose EPTI[ATC'18] to isolate the kernel of unpatched VMs from user-level Meltdown attacks using the Intel VMFUNC instruction. For user-level isolation, I propose TZ-Container[SCIS'21] to isolate containers from untrusted OS with ARM TrustZone. I introduce CPS[ASPLOS'23] to make VM isolation more efficient in many core systems. I also propose XPC[ISCA'19] and its follow-up work [TOCS'22] to provide fast cross-domain call extensions and to speed up the IPC (Inter-Procedure Call) for existing OSes.

Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

I focus on building practical TEE systems and their applications. I first try to enable high-performance TEEs in more scenarios using legacy hardware. For the virtualization environment, I propose vTZ[Security'2017], which is the first secure virtualization system for ARM TrustZone, to enable TrustZone for each VM. The SGXMigration[DSN'2017] is proposed to securely migrate a VM, together with its TEEs. For the OS kernel, I propose COLONY[TC'22] to construct TEE instances at the kernel level to protect OS services. For the heterogeneous environment, I propose XpuTEE(TOCS'25) to build TEEs across CPU and GPU. Based on these TEEs, I have built various high-performance secure systems, such as decentralized file systems, data sharing systems, and LLM inference systems.

• [ACM TOCS] XpuTEE: A High-Performance and Practical Heterogeneous Trusted Execution Environment for GPUs. Shulin Fan, Zhichao Hua*, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.2025.

• [ASPLOS] CPS: A Cooperative Para-virtualized Scheduling Framework for Manycore Machines. Yuxuan Liu, Tianqiang Xu, Zeyu Mi, Zhichao Hua, Binyu Zang, Haibo Chen. The 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, April 2024. [ pdf ]

• [ISCA] ISA-grid: Architecture of Fine-grained Privilege Control for Instructions and Registers. Shulin Fan, Zhichao Hua*, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang. The 50th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA),June 17–21, 2023, Orlando, FL, USA.[ pdf ]

• [ICPADS] SecDFS: A Secure and Decentralized File System. Shenglong Zhao, Zhichao Hua*, Yubin Xia. 2023 IEEE 29th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), Ocean Flower Island, China, 2023. [ pdf ]

• [ACM TOCS] Boosting Inter-Process Communication with Architectural Support. Yubin Xia, Dong Du, Zhichao Hua, Binyu Zang, Haibo Chen, Haibing Guan. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.2022. [ pdf ]

• [IEEE TC] COLONY: A Privileged Trusted Execution Environment with Extensibility. Yubin Xia, Zhichao Hua*, Jinyu Gu, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, 2022. [ pdf ]

• [SCIS] TZ-Container: Protecting Container from Untrusted OS with ARM TrustZone. Zhichao Hua, Yang Yu, Jinyu Gu, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang. SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, 2021. [ pdf ]

• [ISCA] XPC: Architectural Support for Secure and Efficient Cross Process Call. Dong Du, Zhichao Hua, Yubin Xia, Binyu Zang, Haibo Chen. Proceedings of the 46th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. June 22-26, 2019. [ pdf ]

• [USENIX ATC] EPTI: Efficient Defence against Meltdown Attack for Unpatched VMs. Zhichao Hua, Dong Du, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, and Binyu Zang, 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, USA, July 2018 [ pdf ]

• [USENIX Security] vTZ: Virtualizing ARM TrustZone. Zhichao Hua, Jinyu Gu, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang and Haibing Guan. Usenix Security Symposium 2017. Vancouver, Canada, August, 2017. [ pdf ]

• [DSN] Secure Live Migration of SGX Enclaves on Untrusted Cloud. Jinyu Gu, Zhichao Hua, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang, Haibing Guan, Jinming Li. The 47th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, June 26-29, 2017. Denver, CO, USA. [ pdf ]