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].

Please find my CV here.

Publications

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. [[paper to appear], [code to appear]]
Building Verified Neural Networks for Computer Systems with Ouroboros
Tianhao Wei, Zhihao Jia, Changliu Liu, and Cheng Tan
MLSys 2023, Miami, FL, June 2023. [[paper to appear], [code to appear]]
Viper: A Fast Snapshot Isolation Checker
Jian Zhang, Ye Ji, Shuai Mu, and Cheng Tan
EuroSys 2023, Rome, Italy, May 2023. [[paper to appear], 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. [paper, code, arxiv]
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

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

Awards

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.