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About me

I am Zijie Zhao, a third year PhD student in the PL/FM/SE group at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign advised by Lingming Zhang.

I'm most interested in LLM agents for automated vulnerability discovery, drawing on techniques from software engineering and programming languages. I have a particular passion for uncovering bugs in large-scale, foundational systems such as operating system kernels, web browsers, compilers, and virtual machines.

I obtained my bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science at University of California San Diego.

Publication

AnyPoC: Universal Proof-of-Concept Test Generation for Scalable LLM-Based Bug Detection

Zijie Zhao, Chenyuan Yang, Weidong Wang, Yihan Yang, Ziqi Zhang, Lingming Zhang

arXiv 2026

arXiv Bugs Found

KNighter: Transforming Static Analysis with LLM-Synthesized Checkers

Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Zichen Xie, Haoyu Li, Lingming Zhang

SOSP 2025

ACM DL GitHub

Kernelgpt: Enhanced kernel fuzzing via large language models

Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Lingming Zhang

ASPLOS 2025

ACM DL GitHub

WaVe: a verifiably secure WebAssembly sandboxing runtime

Evan Johnson, Evan Laufer, Zijie Zhao, Shravan Narayan, Stefan Savage, Deian Stefan, Fraser Brown

IEEE S&P 2023 🏆 Distinguished Paper Award

IEEE GitHub

Industry Experience

May - Aug 2024, Feb - Aug 2025

Graduate Intern

  • Built a source code level fuzzer MoveSmith for the Aptos Move Compiler and VM stack.
  • MoveSmith is able to generate complex Move programs with high valid rate by respecting rules for language features like ability constraints, lifetime, and ownership.
  • To date, MoveSmith has found 50+ bugs in both the compiler and the VM.
  • Implemented an LLM-based Move program generator to automatically generate diverse tests for new language features.

GitHub

June - Sept 2019

Software Engineer Intern

  • Used React.js, MobX.js, and Bootstrap to build complex web-based financial applications.
  • Maintained existing server-rendered applications built by Ruby on Rails.
  • Reduced page loading time from 18s to 2s and data saving time from 100s to 15s.
  • Optimized over 2400 SQL queries into 600 queries.

Teaching Experience

  • UIUC CS 527: Topics in Software Engineering
  • UIUC CS 427: Software Engineering I
  • UCSD CSE 127: Intro to Computer Security
  • UCSD CSE 21: Mathematics for Algorithms and Systems
  • UCSD CSE 12: Basic Data Structures and OOD
  • UCSD CSE 11: Introduction to Java

Selected Bugs

A selection of bugs that my work found: