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

• PipeLLM: Fast and Confidential Large Language Model Services with Speculative Pipelined Encryption
  Yifan Tan, Cheng Tan, Zeyu Mi, and Haibo Chen
  ASPLOS 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, March 2025. [pdf (to appear), code ]

• NN4SysBench: Characterizing Neural Network Verification for Computer Systems
  Shuyi Lin, Haoyu He, Tianhao Wei, Kaidi Xu, Huan Zhang, Gagandeep Singh, Changliu Liu, and Cheng Tan
  NeurIPS 2024, Datasets and Benchmarks Track, Vancouver, Canada, December 2024. [pdf, code, website (to appear)]

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

• 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.

• (see all papers)

Recent workshop papers

• Instance-Optimized Mapping with Portfolio Methods
  Yibo Zhao, Panagiotis Manolios, and Cheng Tan
  PACMI 2024, Austin, Texas, Nov 2024.

• Simplifying Snapshot Isolation: A New Definition, Equivalence, and Efficient Checking
  Jian Zhang and Cheng Tan
  PaPoC 2024, Athens, Greece, April 2024.

• Exploiting Time Channel Vulnerability of Learned Bloom Filters
  Harman Singh Farwah, Gagandeep Singh, and Cheng Tan
  ICLR TinyPaper 2024, May 2024.

Teaching

• Spring 2024: Computer Systems, Undergrad (CS3650)
• 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)

Students

• Jian Zhang (PhD)
• Brent Zhao (PhD, co-advised with Pete Manolios)
• Shuyi Lin (PhD)
• Zikai Wang (PhD)
• (see Alumni)

Program committee

• OSDI 2025, EuroSys 2025, ATC 2025, MLSys 2025
• MLSys 2024, AAAI SRRAI 2024
• ATC 2023, ICDCS 2023
• SoCC 2022, VEE 2022
• CoNEXT 2021

Honors and Awards

• MSR Asia StarTrack Scholar, 2024
• 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.