Cheng Tan

I am an assistant professor of Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. I’m part of Systems Research Group at Northeastern University.

I’m broadly interested in computer systems. I build systems that enable users to verify their outsourced services. In particular, my recent research includes:

• verifying the execution of applications on untrusted servers,
• verifying behaviors of black-box databases,
• verifying neural networks for systems.

If you are interested in building systems, we should talk [c.tan (at) northeastern.edu].

Publications

• Dropout Attacks
  Andrew Yuan, Alina Oprea, and Cheng Tan
  S&P 2024, San Francisco, CA, May 2024. [[paper to appear], [code to appear], arxiv]

• Encrypted Databases Made Secure Yet Maintainable
  Mingyu Li, Xuyang Zhao, Le Chen, Cheng Tan, Huorong Li, Sheng Wang, Zeyu Mi, Yubin Xia, Feifei Li, and Haibo Chen
  OSDI 2023, Boston, MA, July 2023. [pdf, code]

• Building Verified Neural Networks for Computer Systems with Ouroboros
  Tianhao Wei, Zhihao Jia, Changliu Liu, and Cheng Tan
  MLSys 2023, Miami, FL, June 2023. [pdf, code]

• Predicting GPU Failures With High Precision Under Deep Learning Workloads
  Heting Liu, Zhichao Li, Cheng Tan, Rongqiu Yang, Guohong Cao, Zherui Liu, and Chuanxiong Guo
  SYSTOR 2023, Haifa, Israel, June 2023. [pdf]

• Viper: A Fast Snapshot Isolation Checker
  Jian Zhang, Ye Ji, Shuai Mu, and Cheng Tan
  EuroSys 2023, Rome, Italy, May 2023. [pdf, code]

• NNSmith: Generating Diverse and Valid Test Cases for Deep Learning Compilers
  Jiawei Liu, Jinkun Lin, Fabian Ruffy, Cheng Tan, Jinyang Li, Aurojit Panda, and Lingming Zhang
  ASPLOS 2023, Vancouver, Canada, March 2023. [pdf, code, arxiv]
  Distinguished Artifact Award

• Bringing Decentralized Search to Decentralized Services
  Mingyu Li, Jinhao Zhu, Tianxu Zhang, Cheng Tan, Yubin Xia, Sebastian Angel, and Haibo Chen
  OSDI 2021, July 2021. [pdf, code]

• Cobra: Making Transactional Key-Value Stores Verifiably Serializable
  Cheng Tan, Changgeng Zhao, Shuai Mu, and Michael Walfish
  OSDI 2020, November 2020. [pdf, slides, talk, code]

• Auditing Outsourced Services
  Cheng Tan
  Ph.D. Dissertation, August 2020. [pdf]
  Janet Fabri Prize in Courant Institute

• NetBouncer: Active Device and Link Failure Localization in Data Center Networks
  Cheng Tan, Ze Jin, Chuanxiong Guo, Tianrong Zhang, Haitao Wu, Karl Deng, Dongming Bi, and Dong Xiang
  NSDI 2019, Boston, MA, February 2019. [pdf, slides, talk]

• The Efficient Server Audit Problem, Deduplicated Re-execution, and the Web
  Cheng Tan, Lingfan Yu, Joshua B. Leners, and Michael Walfish
  SOSP 2017, Shanghai, China, October 2017. [pdf, slides, talk, extended report, code]
  Best paper award

• TinMan: Eliminating Confidential Mobile Data Exposure with Security-oriented Offloading
  Yubin Xia, Yutao Liu, Cheng Tan, and Mingyang Ma, Haibing Guan, Binyu Zang, and Haibo Chen.
  Eurosys 2015, Bordeaux, France, April 2015.

Workshop papers

• Characterizing Neural Network Verification for Systems With NN4SysBench
  Haoyu He, Tianhao Wei, Huan Zhang, Changliu Liu, and Cheng Tan
  WFVML 2022, Baltimore, MD, July 2022.

• Building Verified Neural Networks with Specifications for Systems
  Cheng Tan, Yibo Zhu, and Chuanxiong Guo
  Apsys 2021, August 2021.

• PreCrime to the Rescue: Defeating Mobile Malware One Step Ahead
  Cheng Tan, Haibo Li, Yubin Xia, Binyu Zang, Cheng-Kang Chu, and Tieyan Li.
  Apsys 2014, Beijing, China, June 2014.

• TinyChecker: Transparent Protection Of VMs Against Hypervisor Failures With Nested Virtualization
  Cheng Tan, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen, and Binyu Zang.
  DCDV 2012, Boston, MA, June 2012.

Teaching

• Fall 2023: Operating Systems Implementation (CS6640)
• Spring 2023: Computer Systems (CS5600)
• Fall 2022: Neural Networks for Systems (CS7670, Seminar)
• Spring 2022: Computer Systems (CS5600)
• Fall 2021: Computer Systems (CS5600)

Program committee

• MLSys 2024, AAAI SRRAI 2024
• ATC 2023, ICDCS 2023
• SoCC 2022, VEE 2022
• CoNEXT 2021

Awards

• ASPLOS Distinguished Artifact Award, 2023
• NSF CAREER Award, 2023
• NYU Janet Fabri Prize, 2021
• SOSP Best Paper Award, 2017

About me

Before joining Northeastern, I worked as a research scientist at ByteDance AI Lab for a year. Before that, I got my Ph.D. from Courant Institute NYU advised by Michael Walfish, and my M.S. and B.E. from Fudan University and Nanjing University, respectively.

I was a student at NYU Systems Group. Before that, I was at IPADS advised by Binyu Zang and Haibo Chen, where I did research on mobile systems and system virtualization.