Nanzi Yang

Research Assistant Professor, School of Cybersecurity, Old Dominion University
He is in the job market.

📧 yang9467@umn.edu 🎓 Google Scholar

Trustworthy AI Systems AI System Security Cloud Security Agent & Protocol Security (MCP, A2A)

Research Interests

Trustworthy AI systems; AI system security; cloud security; security of AI agents and orchestration protocols (MCP, A2A).

Focus

System-level security for modern AI services: from cloud-native infrastructure to emerging agent protocols.

Keywords

Kubernetes, container platforms, serverless, protocol compliance, security hardening.

Education & Employment

Old Dominion University (2026.06–Present)

Research Assistant Professor, School of Cybersecurity

University of Minnesota (2024–2026.05)

Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Computer Science
Host: Prof. Kangjie Lu

Xidian University

Ph.D. in Cyberspace Security (2019–2024)
B.S. in Information Engineering (2014–2018)

Peer-reviewed Publications

Refereed Publications

Mind the Gap: Detecting Description-Execution Mismatch Attacks in DAO Governance
Bowen Cai, Nanzi Yang, Weiheng Bai, Youshui Lu, Yajin Zhou, Kangjie Lu - ACM CCS 2026
From Fault to Oracle: Breaking Google Pixel TPU Hardware Memory Isolation via Trusted Deserialization Faults
Minghao Lin, Guanxing Wen, Haoxuan Xu, Yuzhou Fang, Nanzi Yang, Xiaokuan Zhang, Yanan Guo, Zhuo Zhang, Mengyuan Li
The Dark Side of Flexibility: Detecting Risky Permission Chaining Attacks in Serverless Applications
Xunqi Liu*, Nanzi Yang*, Chang Li, Jinku Li, Jianfeng Ma, Kangjie Lu — NDSS 2026
Dangers Behind Access Control: Understanding and Exploiting Implicit Permissions in Kubernetes
Nanzi Yang, Xingyu Liu, Wenbo Shen, Jinku Li, Kangjie Lu — ACM CCS 2025
Towards Understanding and Defeating Abstract Resource Attacks for Container Platforms
Wenbo Shen, Yifei Wu, Yutian Yang, Qirui Liu, Nanzi Yang, Jinku Li, Kangjie Lu, Jianfeng Ma — IEEE TDSC 2025
Take Over the Whole Cluster: Attacking Kubernetes via Excessive Permissions of Third-party Applications
Nanzi Yang, Wenbo Shen, Jinku Li, Xunqi Liu, Xin Guo, Jianfeng Ma — ACM CCS 2023
Attacks are forwarded: breaking the isolation of MicroVM-based containers through operation forwarding
Jietao Xiao*, Nanzi Yang*, Wenbo Shen, Jinku Li, Xin Guo, Zhiqiang Dong, Fei Xie, Jianfeng Ma — USENIX Security 2023
Demons in the Shared Kernel: Abstract Resource Attacks Against OS-level Virtualization
Nanzi Yang*, Wenbo Shen*, Jinku Li, Yutian Yang, Kangjie Lu, Jietao Xiao, Tianyu Zhou, Chenggang Qin, Wang Yu, Jianfeng Ma, Kui Ren — ACM CCS 2021

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Industry-Recognized Security Impact

Discovered and responsibly disclosed 10+ CVEs in production cloud systems.
- MicroVM-based containers: CVE-2022-0358 (RedHat, score 7, moderate)
- Kubernetes RBAC & applications: e.g., CVE-2024-9779 (RedHat, score 7.5, high)
- Serverless permission chaining: e.g., CVE-2024-37293 (AWS GitHub, score 7.8, high)
Received two security bounties from Google Bug Hunter for vulnerabilities in Kubernetes-related cloud services.

Grant & Proposal Writing

Contributed substantially to preparation of three faculty-led funding proposals on AI system security and cloud infrastructure hardening, submitted to AWS and Google security funding award programs (technical approach, milestones, evaluation plans).

Mentoring & Teaching

Guest Lecturer — CSCI 5271: Introduction to Computer Security, University of Minnesota (Fall 2025)
Teaching Assistant — Computer System Security, Xidian University (Summer 2022)

Research Mentoring

Mentored four Master's students during Ph.D; two mentored projects led to co-first-author publications at top-tier security conferences (USENIX Security 2023, NDSS 2026).
Mentoring two Ph.D students during PostDoc at UMN; one student is expected to graduate next year.

Service

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Communications
Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Assisting my PostDoc advisor in reviewing manuscripts for NDSS, ACM CCS, and RAID

Awards & Honors

National Scholarship (Ministry of Education, China), 2022
National Scholarship (Ministry of Education, China), 2023
Google Security Bug Bounty

Talks & Presentations

Demons in the Shared Kernel: Abstract Resource Attacks Against OS-level Virtualization, CCS 2021
Attacks are forwarded: breaking the isolation of MicroVM-based containers through operation forwarding, USENIX Security 2023
Take Over the Whole Cluster: Attacking Kubernetes via Excessive Permissions of Third-party Applications, CCS 2023
Dangers Behind Access Control: Understanding and Exploiting Implicit Permissions in Kubernetes Applications, CCS 2025
The Dark Side of Flexibility: Detecting Risky Permission Chaining Attacks in Serverless Applications, NDSS 2026