May 2025: Attended ICSE 2025 and was thrilled to present our paper on "A Methodology for Replicating Historical Exploits on EVM-Compatible Blockchains".
I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto luckily supervised by Prof. Fan Long. My current research focuses on program execution with zero-knowledge proofs, as well as program analysis and synthesis on smart contracts. I maintain a broad interest in programming languages, software engineering, security, and cryptography.
I also work as a Research Engineer at Zircuit on zkrollups and sequencer-level security, where I'm working with Dr. Z-Dr. Martin Derka. and Dr. Jan Gorzny. Previously, I also worked at Quantstamp on smart contract auditing and automated vulnerability detection.
Earlier in my graduate studies, I was mentored by Prof. Umang Mathur in the PLMW program. Prior to that, I was advised by Prof. Xinyu Wang at the University of Michigan on several regular expression program synthesis projects, as well as by Prof. Paul A. Green on driving simulator projects.
News
March 2025: Our paper "Sequencer Level Security" has been accepted as a poster at ICBC 2025! See you in Rome - this technique is one of the main innovations behind Zircuit.
March 2025: Attended ETH Denver as a hackathon judge and company booth presenter. Super excited to chat with industrial experts! [Tweet]
March 2025: Attended SANER 2025 and was thrilled to present our paper on "Instrumenting Transaction Trace Properties in Smart Contracts: Extending EVM for Real-Time Security".
Feb 2025: Zircuit's roadmap for 2025 was released: two of my papers have been integrated and will be the focus. Read more: Zircuit Technical Roadmap Part II: Scaling Securely
Jan 2025: Our paper "Instrumenting Transaction Trace Properties in Smart Contracts: Extending EVM for Real-Time Security" has been accepted for publication at SANER-IWBOSE 2025. See you in Montreal!
Dec 2024: Our paper "A Methodology for Replicating Historical Exploits on EVM-Compatible Blockchains" has been accepted for publication at ICSE-WETSEB 2025. See you in Ottawa!
Education
University of Toronto
PhD in Computer Science, 2026 (Expected)
Advisor: Prof. Fan Long
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science, minor in Mathematics, Summa Cum Laude, Sept 2019 - May 2021
Advisor: Prof. Xinyu Wang
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering, minor in Entrepreneurship, Sept 2017 - Aug 2021
Publications
Academia
Zhiyang Chen, Ye Liu, Sidi Mohamed Beillahi, Yi Li, Fan Long, “OpenTracer: A Dynamic Transaction Trace Analyzer for Smart Contract Invariant Generation and Beyond” (ASE 2024 Tool Demonstrations)
Zhiyang Chen, Ye Liu, Sidi Mohamed Beillahi, Yi Li, Fan Long, “Demystifying Invariant Effectiveness for Securing Smart Contracts” (FSE 2024)
[paper] [extended paper] [artifact] [benchmarks] [invariant study results] [slides] [poster]
Zhiyang Chen, Sidi Mohamed Beillahi, Fan Long, “FlashSyn: Flash Loan Attack Synthesis via Counter Example Driven Approximation” (ICSE 2024)
[paper] [extended paper] [artifact] [slides]
Tianyi Zhang, Zhiyang Chen, Yuanli Zhu, Priyan Vaithilingam, Xinyu Wang, Elena L. Glassman, “Interpretable Program Synthesis”, Proceedings of CHI 2021
Industry
Martin Derka, Jan Gorzny, Diego Siqueira, Donato Pellegrino, Marius Guggenmos, Zhiyang Chen, “Sequencer Level Security”, IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC 2025 Poster)
[paper]
Zhiyang Chen, Phillip Kemper, Yi Liu, Jan Gorzny, Diego Siqueira, Yuekang Li, Donato Pellegrino, and Martin Derka, “A Methodology for Replicating Historical Exploits on EVM-Compatible Blockchains”, 7th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain (ICSE-WETSEB 2025)
Awards & Grants
- ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant, ACM SIGSOFT CAPS, 2024
- DCS Travel Grant, University of Toronto, 2024
- Bell Graduate Scholarship, 2024
- Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship with Bank of Canada, 2023-2024
- Co-author of Ethereum Foundation Grant FY23-0882 (Back-End API Standard for L2 Block Explorers), 2023
- Smart Contract Research Forum Grant, 2022
- The Wolfond Scholarship in Wireless Information Technology, 2021
- Outstanding graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2021
- James B. Angell Scholar, UMich, 2021
Services & Teaching
Paper Review Services
- Reviewer, Automated Software Engineering (Springer) 2025
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) 2025
- Reviewer, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 2025
- Junior PC Member, The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) 2025
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM) 2024, 2025
- Sub-reviewer, FSE 2023, ICSE 2024, ASE 2024 2022–2023
Artifact Evaluation Services
- Artifact Evaluation PC Member, CAV 2025 2025
- Artifact Evaluation PC Member, ICSE 2025 2025
- Artifact Evaluation PC Member, PLDI 2024 2024
Other Service Roles
- Student Volunteer (Remote), OOPSLA 2022 2022
- Tau Beta Phi–Michigan Gamma, elected Nov 2020 (K–12 & professional activities) 2020
Teaching
- Head TA of CSC488/2107: Compilers and Interpreters, UofT Winter 2023
- TA of CSC373: Algorithm Design, Analysis & Complexity, UofT Fall 2022
- TA of CSC263: Data Structures and Analysis, UofT Winter 2022
- TA of CSC108: Introduction to Computer Programming, UofT Fall 2021
- Grader of MATH 450 Advanced Mathematics for Engineers I, UMich Winter 2021
- Grader of MATH 214 Linear Algebra, UMich Fall 2020
Miscellaneous
- Update (2025/03): I roughly discovered my current research taste - “dig deep enough, the novelty just comes out naturally.”
- My signature tagline: “I'm a dreamer, but I'm also practical enough to version control it.”
- I volunteer at the Toronto Cat Rescue, where I help foster cats at home, 2025
- I also volunteer at the Toronto Fort York Food Bank, helping distribute free food to people in trouble, 2024-2025
- (2024/08) I started investigating the 'philosophy' in my Doctor of Philosophy program. In the future, I might write down this journey.
- Pirates of the Caribbean is my favorite movie. I try to learn how to become a Pirate.
- I'm not religious, but I'm an afterlife believer: people will either reunite with their deceased loved ones in another world or return back to this world in another form.
Finished Undergraduate Research Projects
Click to Expand Projects
Accelerate Regular Expression Synthesis via Subexpression Queries
Individual research project of EECS499
with Prof. Xinyu Wang
[report]
This project proposes an algorithm to synthesize the most probable sub-expressions of a ground-truth regular expression based on input–output examples and evaluates the effectiveness of subexpression queries.
Interpretable Program Synthesis
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
with Tianyi Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Elena Glassman
This work unveils the synthesis process by providing representations that explain and let users guide the program synthesis with varying levels of detail.
Real-Time and Virtual Driving Simulator
Project of Multidisciplinary Design Program
with Prof. Paul Green
[2-min presentation slides] [code]
This project presents a GUI tool designed to assist researchers in conducting traffic experiments using the CARLA real-time driving simulator.