Qinhan Tan
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I'm a fifth year Phd candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Princeton University advised by Prof. Sharad Malik. Prior to joining Princeton, I finished my undergraduate in Zhejiang University.
My research interest lies in hardware formal verification and hardware security. I care about using mathematical logic to rigorously reasoning about the functionality and security of systems. My past research includes designing secure cache, proving security of hardware secure enclave, formally detecting transient execution vulnerabilities in processors, extracting functional subsets of hardware accelerators etc..
Email: qinhant at princeton dot edu
I'm graduating in September 2025 and I'm looking for research positions in the field of security or formal verification. I'm always open to chats!
Selected Publications (* denotes co-first authors)
Hardware Security Verification
Qinhan Tan*, Yuheng Yang*, Thomas Bourgeat, Sharad Malik, Mengjia Yan, RTL verification for secure speculation using contract shadow logic, ASPLOS 2025
Qinhan Tan*, Yonathan Fisseha*, Shibo Chen*, Lauren Biernacki, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Sharad Malik, Todd Austin, Security verification of low-trust architectures, CCS 2023, Distinguished Paper Award
Hardware Functional Verification
Qinhan Tan, Aarti Gupta, Sharad Malik, Usage-Based RTL Subsetting for Hardware Accelerators, ICCAD 2022
Secure Hardware Design
Qinhan Tan*, Zhihua Zeng*, Kai Bu, Kui Ren, PhantomCache: Obfuscating Cache Conflicts with Localized Randomization, NDSS 2020
Teaching
ECE 206 Contemporary Logic Design, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
ECE 580 Advanced Topics in Computer Engineering-Hardware Security, Spring 2023, Spring 2025
Selected Honors
CCS Distinguished Paper Award, 2023
Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science Award for Excellence, 2023
Princeton ECE Departmental Teaching Assistant Award, 2023
Zhejiang Provincial Government Scholarship, 2019
Zhejiang University First-class Scholarship for Academic Excellence, 2019
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