I am an Assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Central Florida. I am leading the Computer Architecture and Systems Research (CASR) lab. My research interests are in the areas of computer architecture, security, machine learning, and energy efficient computing.
For students: We have multiple PhD positions available. If you are interested in working with me, please contact me via fan.yao@ucf.edu. For more information, please visit our research group page

News
- One paper is accepted in IEEE Micro. (Jan. 2023)
- Our work D-Shield is accepted in HPCA’23. Congrats Chowdhuryy! (Oct. 2022)
- We released the PoC source for DeepSteal system exploit in Github (June 2022).
- Our work DeepSteal is accepted in IEEE S&P ’22 (Oakland). (March 2022)
- One paper is accepted in IEEE HOST ’22. (February 2022)
- LockedDown is accepted in IEEE EuroS&P ’22. (February 2022)
- Our collaborative work on far-field GPU EM side channels is accepted in IEEE S&P ’22 (Oakland). (November 2021)
- Fan is invited to serve in following committees: ISCA’22 (ERC) and DAC’22 1> (TPC). (October 2021)
- Our work BranchSpectre is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computers. (October 2021)
- Two papers are accepted in SEED’21. (August 2021)
- Our work LADDER is accepted in MICRO’21. Congrats Chowdhuryy! (July 2021)
- Fan will serve in the External Review Committee (ERC) of MICRO’21.
- Fan is invited to serve in the PC of the Inaugural IEEE SEED’21 conference.
- Fan will serve in the program committees of NAS’21, ICCD’21, IISWC’21, and SPSL@ISCA’21.
- One paper is accepted in DAC ’21 as work-in-progress (Feb. 2021).
- Our collaborative work on analysis of RAPL-based information leakage is accepted in AsiaCCS’21 (Oct. 2020).
- We released the PoC source for BranchSpec in Github (Oct. 2020).
- One recent work is accepted in ICCD ’20 (August 2020).
- We recieved an award from NSF CNS to explore side channel attacks
and defenses in NVM-integrated
computing systems (August 2020). - We recieved an award from NSF SaTC to investigate ML security
issues due to hardware-based
model tampering (August 2020). - Our work DeepHammer will appear in USENIX Security ’20 (March 2020).
- Fan will serve in the PC of ICCD ’20 (Feb. 2020).
- One paper accepted in SAC'20 (Dec. 2019).
- Fan will serve as a Program Committee member in HPCA’20 (Sept. 2019).
- COTSKnight will appear in IEEE Micro (June 2019).
- One paper is accepted in HPDC'19 (June 2019).
- Our paper (COTSKnight) is accepted in HOST'19 (Feb. 2019).
- Our research group got awarded with one Amazon AWS research grant, thanks Amazon! (Jan. 2019).
- Fan will serve as a Program Committee member in ICCD’19 (Nov. 2018).
- Fan attended the NSF CSR PI meeting at Seattle, WA (Sept. 2018).
Publications
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Rickard Ewetz, Amro Awad and Fan Yao, Understanding and Characterizing Side Channels Exploiting Phase Change Memories, In IEEE Micro, 2023.
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Myoungsoo Jung, Fan Yao, Amro Awad, D-Shield: Enabling Processor-side Encryption and Integrity Verification for Secure NVMe Drives, In IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, 2023 (HPCA'23).
- Adnan Siraj Rakin+, Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy+, Fan Yao and Deliang Fan (+Co-first authors), DeepSteal: Advanced Model Extractions Leveraging Efficient Weight Stealing in Memories, In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022 (S&P'22). [PDF]
- Zihao Zhan, Zhenkai Zhang, Sisheng Liang, Fan Yao, Xenofon
Koutsoukos, Graphics Peeping Unit: Exploiting EM Side-Channel Information of GPUs to
Eavesdrop on Your Neighbors, In IEEE Symposium on
Security and Privacy, 2022 (S&P'22). [PDF]
- Kunbei Cai, Zhenkai Zhang and Fan Yao,
On the Feasibility of Training-time Trojan Attacks Through Hardware-based Faults in Memory, In
IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST'22).
- Mert Side, Fan Yao and Zhenkai Zhang,
LockedDown: Exploiting Contention on Host-GPU PCIe Bus for Fun and Profit, In
IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P'22).
- M. Rashed, F. Yao, SK Jha, and R. Ewetz,
Hybrid Digial-Digital In-Memory Computing, In
Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference, 2022 (DATE'22).
- M. Rashed, S. Thijssen, F. Yao, SK Jha, and R. Ewetz,
STREAM: Towards READ-based In-Memory Computing for Streaming based Data Processing, In
Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, 2022 (ASP-DAC'22).
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Muhammad R. Haq Rashed, Amro Awad,
Rickard Ewetz and Fan Yao, LADDER: Architecting Content and Location-aware Writes for
Crossbar Resistive Memories, In IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture,
2021 (MICRO'21). [PDF]
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy and Fan Yao, Leaking Secrets
through Modern Branch Predictor in the Speculative World, In IEEE Transactions on
Computers, 2021 (TC'21).
[PDF]
[Code]
- Adnan Siraj Rakin, Zhezhi He, Jingtao Li, Fan Yao, Chaitali
Chakrabarti and Deliang Fan, T-BFA: Targeted Bit-Flip Adversarial Weight Attack, In
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2021
(TPAMI'21). [PDF]
- Kunbei Cai, Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Zhenkai Zhang and Fan
Yao, NMT-Stroke: Diverting Neural Machine Translation through Hardware-based
Faults, In IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment
Design, 2021 (SEED'21). [PDF]
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Rickard Ewetz, Amro Awad and Fan
Yao, R-SAW: New Side Channels Exploiting Read Asymmetry in MLC Phase Change
Memories, In IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment
Design, 2021 (SEED'21). [PDF]
- Hongyu Fang, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Milos
Doroslovacki and Guru Venkataramani, Defeating Cache Timing Channels with Hardware
Prefetchers, In IEEE Design and Test, 2021 (HES Top Picks
Special Issue).
- Zhenkai Zhang, Sisheng Liang, Fan Yao and Xing Gao, Red
Alert for Power Leakage: Exploiting Intel RAPL-Induced Side Channels, In ACM Asia
Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2021 (AsiaCCS'21). [PDF]
- Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy, Hang Liu and Fan Yao,
BranchSpec: Information Leakage Attacks Exploiting Speculative Branch Instruction
Executions, In IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, 2020
(ICCD'20).
[PDF]
[TR]
[Video]
[Code]
- Fan Yao, Adnan Siraj Rakin and Deliang Fan, DeepHammer:
Depleting the Intelligence of Deep Neural Networks through Targeted Chain of Bit Flips,
In USENIX Security, 2020 (SEC'20). [PDF] [Slides] [Talk]
- Hongyu Fang, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Milos
Doroslovacki and Guru Venkataramani, Cache-Zoomer: On-demand High-resolution Cache
Monitoring for Security, In Journal of Hardware and Systems Security, 2020
(HaSS'20).
- Zhishan Guo, Kecheng Yang, Fan Yao and Amro Awad,
Inter-Task Cache Interference Aware Partitioned Real-Time Scheduling, In ACM/SIGAPP
Symposium On Applied Computing, 2020 (SAC'20).
- Vamsee Reddy Kommareddy, Baogang Zhang, Fan Yao, Rickard
Ewetz, and Amro Awad, Are Crossbar Memories Secure? New Security Vulnerabilities in Crossbar
Memories, In IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 2019 (CAL'19).
[PDF]
- Sai Santhosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Guru Venkataramani,
PowerStar: Improving Power Efficiency in Heterogenous Processors for Bursty Workloads with
Approximate Computing, In IEEE Cloudcom, 2019 (CloudCom'19).
[PDF]
- Fan Yao, Hongyu Fang, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru
Venkataramani, HolDCSim: A Holistic Simulator for Data Centers, In IEEE International
Symposium on Workload Characterization, 2019 (IISWC'19). [PDF] [Extended
Version]
- Fan Yao, Hongyu Fang, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru
Venkataramani, Leveraging Cache Management Hardware for Practical Defense against Cache
Timing Channel Attacks, In IEEE Micro, 2019.
[PDF]
- Anil Gaihre, Zhenlin Wu, Fan Yao and Hang Liu, XBFS:
eXploring Runtime Optimizations for Breadth-First Search on GPUs, In ACM International
Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2019
(HPDC'19).
- Fan Yao, Hongyu Fang, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru
Venkataramani, COTSknight: Practical Defense against Cache Timing Channel Attacks using
Cache Monitoring and Partitioning Technologies, In IEEE International Symposium on
Hardware Oriented Security and Trust 2019 (HOST'19). [PDF] [Talk]
- Hongyu Fang, Fan Yao, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru
Venkataramani, Negative Correlation, Non-linear Filtering, and Discovering of Repetitiveness
for Cache Timing Channel Detection, In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics,
Speech, and Signal Processing, 2019 (ICASSP'19). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Milos Doroslovacki, Guru
Venkataramani, Covert Timing Channels Exploiting Cache Coherence Hardware:
Characterization and Defense, In Springer International Journal on Parallel Programming
(IJPP'18).
[PDF]
- Hongyu Fang, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Milos
Doroslovacki, Guru Venkataramani, PrODACT: Prefetch-Obfuscator to Defend Against Cache
Timing Channels, In Springer International Journal on Parallel Programming
(IJPP'2018).
- Fan Yao, Hongyu Fang, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru
Venkataramani, WiP: Towards a Stronger Indicator for Detecting Cache Timing
Channel, In Annual Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for
Security and Privacy held in conjunction with ISCA 2018 (HASP'18).
- Fan Yao, Milos Doroslovacki and Guru Venkataramani,
Are Coherence Protocol States vulnerable to Information Leakage?, In IEEE
International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, 2018
(HPCA'18). [PDF][Talk]
- Hongyu Fang, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Milos
Doroslovacki, Guru Venkataramani, A Noise-resilient Detection Method against Advanced
Cache Timing Channel Attacks, In IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and
Computers, 2018 (ACSSC'18).
- Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Guru Venkataramani and Suresh
Subramaniam, TS-BatPro: Improving Energy Efficiency in Data Centers by Leveraging
Temporal-spatial Batching, In IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and
Networking (IEEE TGCN'18).
[PDF]
- Bingqian Lu, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Guru
Venkataramani, Suresh Subramaniam, PopCorns: Power Optimization using a Cooperative
Network-Server approach for Data Centers, In IEEE International Conference on Computer
Communications and Networks (ICCCN'18). [PDF]
- Hongyu Fang, Sai Santosh Dayapule, Fan Yao, Milos
Doroslovacki and Guru Venkataramani, Prefetch-guard: Leveraging Hardware Prefetchers to
Defend against Cache Timing Channels (short paper), In IEEE International
Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust, 2018 (HOST'18). [PDF] (Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security)
- Fan Yao, Yongbo Li, Yurong Chen, Hongfa Xue, Tian Lan and
Guru Venkataramani, StatSym: Vulnerable Path Discovery through Statistics-guided
Symbolic Execution, In IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable
Systems and Networks, 2017 (accepted 49 out of 220 submissions) (DSN'17).
[PDF] [Demo]
- Fan Yao, Guru Venkataramani and Milos Doroslovacki,
Covert Timing Channels Exploiting Non-Uniform Memory Access based Architectures, In the
ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, 2017. (accepted 48 out of 197 submissions)
(GLSVLSI'17). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Guru Venkataramani and
Suresh Subramaniam, TS-Bat: Leveraging temporal-spatial batching for data center
energy optimization, In IEEE GLOBECOM, 2017
(GLOBECOM'17). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Suresh Subramaniam and Guru
Venkataramani, WASP: Workload Adaptive Energy-Latency Optimization in Server Farms
using Server Low-Power States, In IEEE International Conference on Cloud
Computing, 2017 (IEEE CLOUD'17). [PDF]
- Hongfa Xue, Yurong Chen, Fan Yao, Yongbo Li, Tian Lan and
Guru Venkataramani. SIMBER: Eliminating Redundant Memory Bound Checks via Statistical
Inference, In IFIP Conference on ICT Systems Security and
Privacy Protection, 2017 (IFIP-SEC'17). [PDF]
- Yongbo Li, Fan Yao, Tian Lan and Guru Venkataramani.
SARRE: Semantics-Aware Rule Recommendation and Enforcement for Event Paths on
Android, In IEEE Transaction on Information Forensics and
Security, 2016 (TIFS'16). [PDF]
- Yongbo Li, Fan Yao, Tian Lan and Guru Venkataramani.
Semantics-Aware Rule Recommendation and Enforcement for Event Paths on
Android, In EAI SecureComm (Poster), 2015
(SecureComm'15). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Guru Venkataramani and Suresh
Subramaniam, A Dual Delay Timer Strategy for Optimizing Server Farm
Energy, In IEEE CloudCom, 2015
(CloudCom'15). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Jingxin Wu, Guru Venkataramani and Suresh
Subramaniam, A Comparative Analysis of Data Center Network
Architectures, In IEEE International Conference on Communications,
2014 (ICC'14). [PDF]
- Fan Yao, Jie Chen and Guru
Venkataramani, JOP-alarm: Detecting Jump-oriented Programming-based anomalies
in applications (short paper), In IEEE International Conference on
Computer Design (ICCD'13). [PDF]
- Jie Chen, Fan Yao and Guru Venkataramani,
Watts-inside: A Hardware-Software Cooperative Approach for Multicore Power
Debugging,
In IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD'13). [PDF]
- Adnan Siraj Rakin*, Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy*, Fan Yao
and Deliang Fan, DeepSteal: Advanced Model Extractions Leveraging Efficient Weight Stealing
in Memories, ArXiv:2111.04625 [cs.CR], 2021 (*Joint co-first authors with equal
contributions). [PDF]
Professional Services
Program Committee- Program Committe Member, HPCA (2020)
- External Review Committee (ERC), MICRO (2020, 2021)
- External Review Committee (ERC), ISCA (2022)
- Program Committe Member, ICCD (2019, 2020, 2021)
- Program Committe Member, IISWC (2021)
- Program Committe Member, NAS (2021, 2022)
- Program Committe Member, SEED (2021)
- Program Committee Member, ICDIS (2018)
- Publication Chair, IISWC (2021)
- Local Chair, IISWC (2019)
- Proceeding Chair, ICCD (2020, 2021)
- Registration Chair, HPCA (2019)
Awards and Honors
- Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security, 2019
- GWU Best Dissertation Award, 2019
- NSF GW I-Corps Site Grant Award, 2018
- GWU SEAS R&D Showcase 2nd Place in Experimental Research, 2018
Contacts
Office: 359 Harris Engineering Center (HEC)
College of Engineering and Computer Science
University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida
Email: [first name].[last name]@ucf.edu