Danfeng Zhang

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering · June 30, 2026 Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become a cornerstone of confidential computing, attracting significant attention from academia and industry. To support secure and scalable application deployment on confidential clouds, TEE containers (Tc ... Full text Cite

Agora: Trust Less and Open More in Verification for Confidential Computing

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · October 9, 2025 Confidential computing (CC), designed for security-critical scenarios, uses remote attestation to guarantee code integrity on cloud servers. However, CC alone cannot provide assurance of high-level security properties (e.g., no data leak) on the code. In t ... Full text Cite

AVOIDING FLOATING-POINT SIDE CHANNELS IN THE REPORT NOISY MAX WITH GAP MECHANISM

Journal article Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality · January 1, 2025 The Noisy Max mechanism and its variations are fundamental private selection algorithms that are used to select items from a set of candidates (such as the most common diseases in a population), while controlling the privacy leakage in the underlying data. ... Full text Cite

RECONSTRUCTION ATTACKS ON AGGRESSIVE RELAXATIONS OF DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY

Journal article Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality · August 27, 2024 Differential privacy is a widely accepted formal privacy definition that allows aggregate information about a dataset to be released while controlling privacy leakage for individuals whose records appear in the data. Due to the unavoidable tension between ... Full text Cite

EXACT PRIVACY ANALYSIS OF THE GAUSSIAN SPARSE HISTOGRAM MECHANISM

Journal article Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality · January 1, 2024 Sparse histogram methods can be useful for returning differentially private counts of items in large or infinite histograms or large group-by queries, and more generally, releasing a set of statistics with sufficient item counts. We consider the Gaussian v ... Full text Cite

Quantifying and Mitigating Cache Side Channel Leakage with Differential Set

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · October 16, 2023 Cache side-channel attacks leverage secret-dependent footprints in CPU cache to steal confidential information, such as encryption keys. Due to the lack of a proper abstraction for reasoning about cache side channels, existing static program analysis tools ... Full text Cite

Answering Private Linear Queries Adaptively using the Common Mechanism

Journal article Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · January 1, 2023 When analyzing confidential data through a privacy filter, a data scientist often needs to decide which queries will best support their intended analysis. For example, an analyst may wish to study noisy two-way marginals in a dataset produced by a mechanis ... Full text Cite

Free gap estimates from the exponential mechanism, sparse vector, noisy max and related algorithms

Journal article VLDB Journal · January 1, 2023 Private selection algorithms, such as the exponential mechanism, noisy max and sparse vector, are used to select items (such as queries with large answers) from a set of candidates, while controlling privacy leakage in the underlying data. Such algorithms ... Full text Cite

SpecSafe: Detecting cache side channels in a speculative world

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · October 1, 2021 The high-profile Spectre attack and its variants have revealed that speculative execution may leave secret-dependent footprints in the cache, allowing an attacker to learn confidential data. However, existing static side-channel detectors either ignore spe ... Full text Cite

Optimizing fitness-for-use of differentially private linear Queries

Journal article Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · January 1, 2021 In practice, differentially private data releases are designed to support a variety of applications. A data release is fit for use if it meets target accuracy requirements for each application. In this paper, we consider the problem of answering linear que ... Full text Cite

A derivation framework for dependent security label inference

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · November 1, 2018 Dependent security labels (security labels that depend on program states) in various forms have been introduced to express rich information flow policies. They are shown to be essential in the verification of real-world software and hardware systems such a ... Cite

SHErrLoc: A static holistic error locator

Journal article ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems · August 1, 2017 We introduce a general way to locate programmer mistakes that are detected by static analyses. The program analysis is expressed in a general constraint language that is powerful enough to model type checking, information flow analysis, dataflow analysis, ... Full text Cite

AspectC2C: A symmetric aspect extension to the C language

Journal article ACM SIGPLAN Notices · February 1, 2008 By separating crosscutting concerns into modules, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) can greatly improve the maintainability, understandability and reusability of software. However, the asymmetric paradigm adopted by most AOP extensions could bring crosscut ... Cite