Explore UAB

Colleges & Schools

Department of Computer Science College of Arts and Sciences

Yuliang Zheng

Yuliang Zheng. Professor and Chair
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
University Hall 4111
(205) 934-8655
Website

Research and Teaching Interests: Cryptocurrency, Cyber Security, Digital Privacy, Modern Cryptography

Office Hours: By appointment

Education:

  • B.S., Nanjing Institute of Technology, China
  • M.S., Yokohama National University, Japan
  • Ph.D., Yokohama National University, Japan
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia

Personal Website

Dr. Yuliang Zheng joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham in July 2015 to serve as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science. An innovator in education, Dr. Zheng has been spearheading UAB’s efforts to establish an interdisciplinary academic program in Big Data Analytics as well as nano-degrees that can be stacked towards a full degree in computer science and related fields.

He is widely known as the father of the signcryption technology, which is now an ISO international standard for cyber security. His pioneering research in immunizing public key encryption against adaptive attacks has been embodied in a multiple number of industry standards including those from ISO, IEEE and IETF. A prolific researcher with more than 230 refereed publications, Dr. Zheng has been at the forefront of establishing international standards for cryptographic engineering. He plays an active leadership role in international research communities, co-founding the annual Public Key Cryptography (PKC) conference sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and the annual International Conference on Information Theoretic Security (ICITS).

Dr. Zheng serves on the steering committees for a number of research and industrial forums including PKC (Chair of the PKC steering committee since 2007), International Conference on Information Theoretic Security, Information Security Conference, IEEE Security in Storage Workshop, and IEEE Information Assurance Standards Committee. He was invited to serve as an associate editor of The Computer Journal published by the Oxford University Press and as a guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Dr. Zheng is among a small group of international experts who have been invited to serve as a member of a program committee for all the five most important annual international conference series in cyber security and cryptography, namely ACM-CCS, RSA, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT and ASIACRYPT.

  • Research Interests

    Dr. Zheng’s research focuses on data encryption and authentication algorithms and protocols, and their applications in cyber security and privacy. His interest in efficient data security algorithms for low-powered devices such as smart cards and cell phones led to the invention of signcryption that simultaneously provides the functions of both confidentiality and authenticity. Signcryption has since been adopted by the International Standardization Organization (ISO) as a global standard for cyber security.

    Dr. Zheng’s recent research interests include security for the Internet of Things, security in cloud computing and storage, privacy, cryptocurrencies and security algorithms that are resilient against powerful attacks using future quantum computers.

  • Recent Courses

    Follow the linked course names to see sample syllabi which describe course aims, learning objectives, requirements, and schedules. These are samples only. The instructor may make changes to these syllabi in future courses.

  • Select Publications
    • Puwen Wei and Yuliang Zheng. 2015. On the Construction of Public Key Encryption with Sender Recovery. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 26, 1 (2015), 1-31.
    • Graham Enos and Yuliang Zheng. 2015. An ID-based Signcryption Scheme with Compartmented Secret Sharing for Unsigncryption. Information Processing Letters 115 (2015), 128-33.
    • Alex Dent and Yuliang Zheng. 2010. Applied Signcryption. Springer Verlag.
    • Joonsang Baek, Ron Steinfeld, and Yuliang Zheng. 2007. Formal Proofs for the Security of Signcryption. Journal of Cryptology 20 (No. 2, April 2007), 203-35.
    • Ron Steinfeld and Yuliang Zheng. 2004. On the Security of RSA with Primes Sharing Least-Significant Bits. AAECC — Applied Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing 15, 3-4 (2004), 179-200.
    • Yuliang Zheng. 1997. Digital Signcryption or How to Achieve Cost(Signature & Encryption) << Cost(Signature) + Cost(Encryption). Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO’97, LNCS 1294 (1997), 165-79.
    • Jennifer Seberry, Xian-Mo Zhang, and Yuliang Zheng. 1995. Nonlinearity and Propagation Characteristics of Balanced Boolean Functions. Information and Computation 119, 1 (1995), 1-13.
    • Yuliang Zheng and Jennifer Seberry. 1993. Immunizing Public Key Cryptosystems against Chosen Ciphertext Attacks. Special Issue on Secure Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 11, 5 (June 1993), 715-24.
    • Yuliang Zheng, Josef Pieprzyk, and Jennifer Seberry. 1993. HAVAL — A One-Way Hashing Algorithm with Variable Length of Output. Advances in Cryptology — AUSCRYPT'92, LNCS 718 (1993), 83-104.
  • Academic Distinctions and Professional Societies
    • Telecom System Technology Award, The Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, Japan (www.taf.or.jp), 2003.
    • Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty Research Award, College of Information technology, UNC Charlotte, April 2004.
    • Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Standardization, Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (ITSCJ, 情報処理学会 情報規格調査会), 2012.
    • Thinker in Residence, Deakin University, Australia, 2013.