Hi! I am an incoming CS Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley starting Fall 2025. I am interested in the intersection of security, software systems, and data. To understand and mitigate evolving computer security threats, I work to design and develop tools to detect and defend against a wide range of vulnerabilities in software and systems.

Previously, I completed my master’s degree at Tsinghua University, where I was advised by Prof. Yu Jiang in WingTecher Lab - Software System Security Assurance Group. I visited the University of Chicago and spent a wonderful summer there, advised by Prof. Grant Ho. I received my bachelor’s degree from Sichuan University.

A special thank you goes to Yihao for taking this profile photo. In my free time, I am into table tennis, running, science fictions, and livehouse band performance.

News

Publications

ISSTA'25

Preventing Disruption of System Backup Against Ransomware Attacks

Yiwei Hou, Lihua Guo, Chijin Zhou, Quan Zhang, Wenhuan Liu, Chengnian Sun, Yu Jiang

The 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA’25)

PDF / Code / DOI

First-round Direct Acceptance: 23/553=4.16%

Acceptance Rate: 107/550=19.4%

FSE'25

Ransomware Detection Through Temporal Correlation Between Encryption and I/O Behavior

Lihua Guo, Yiwei Hou, Chijin Zhou, Quan Zhang, Yu Jiang

The 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE’25)

PDF / Code / DOI

First-round Direct Acceptance: 70/612=11.43%

ICSE'24

An Empirical Study of Data Disruption by Ransomware Attacks

Yiwei Hou, Lihua Guo, Chijin Zhou, Yiwen Xu, Zijing Yin, Shanshan Li, Chengnian Sun, Yu Jiang

The 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’24)

PDF / Dataset / Code / DOI

Acceptance Rate: 234/1051=22.3%

Oakland'23

Limits of I/O Based Ransomware Detection: An Imitation Based Attack

Chijin Zhou, Lihua Guo, Yiwei Hou, Zhenya Ma, Quan Zhang, Mingzhe Wang, Zhe Liu, Yu Jiang

The 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P “Oakland” 23)

PDF / Code / Talk / DOI

Acceptance Rate: 195/1147=17.0%

EMSOFT'22

MIDAS: Safeguarding IoT Devices Against Malware via Real-Time Behavior Auditing

Yiwen Xu, Zijing Yin, Yiwei Hou, Jianzhong Liu, Yu Jiang

The 22nd ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT’22)

IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD 2022 41(11))

PDF / Talk / DOI

IP&M 59(5)

Identification of Chinese Dark Jargons in Telegram Underground Markets Using Context-oriented and Linguistic Features

Yiwei Hou, Hailin Wang, Haizhou Wang

Information Processing and Management (IP&M 2022 59(5))

PDF / Code / Dataset / DOI

Honors and Awards

Distinguished Thesis Award & Outstanding Graduate Award, School of Software Tsinghua University (Top 7%) (2025)

Excellent Comprehensive Scholarship, Tsinghua University (2022, 2023, 2024)

Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Sichuan Province (Top 3% in the province) (2022)

‘Top 10 Undergraduate of the Year’, Sichuan University (Top 0.03% in the univ.) (2022)

National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China (Top 0.2% in China) (2019, 2020)

Education

August 2025 - present, Ph.D. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley.

August 2022 - June 2025, Master’s in Software Engineering, Tsinghua University. GPA 3.92/4.0

September 2018 - June 2022, B.E. in Cybersecurity, Sichuan University. GPA 3.96/4.0, ranked 1/172

Academic Service

[Teaching Assistant] Model-driven Software Development, Tsinghua University, Fall 2024, Course No.44100662 (for ~80 undergraduates)

[Journal Reviewer] Information Processing & Management

[Artifact Evaluation Committee] CCS’23, ISSTA’24

[External Reviewer] EMSOFT(2022,2024), FSE(2024,2025), ISSTA(2024,2025), ICSE(2024,2025,2026)

Last updated on July 8, 2025. Thanks to Yi Ren for the awesome website template AcadHomepage.

Spring at Tsinghua

ICSE24 in Lisbon

2024 Summer at Uchicago

USENIX Security24 in Philadelphia

ISSTA25 in Trondheim

Graduation