Chris (Shaopeng) Lin

Office: BA5214 University of Toronto

Email: shaopenglin@cs.toronto.edu

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Toronto (UofT), working with Prof. Gururaj Saileshwar in the Securing Systems via Trustworthy Hardware (SITH) Lab.

I am seeking internship opportunities in Systems & ML Security, HPC, or Compilers for Summer 2026. Please feel free to reach out if you’re interested.

My research interests span hardware, memory, and machine learning (ML) security, compiler optimizations, and ML systems and accelerators. Currently, I focus on Rowhammer attacks and defenses, as well as securing ML systems against emerging threat vectors. My earlier work demonstrated the feasibility of Rowhammer attacks on NVIDIA GPUs, which can be exploited to degrade deep learning models. I have also contributed to enhancing Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC), a state-of-the-art Rowhammer defense. More recently, I’ve been exploring compiler and hardware techniques to attack or protect large language model (LLM) training and inference pipelines, as well as parallel computing systems.

As a software engineer, I have a strong interest in low-level and hardware-centric programming, with over two years of experience in C/C++ and Python. I also have experience in compiler engineering and Qt-based GUI development. I previously interned at Huawei Canada and participated in Google Summer of Code through open-source contributions. In my spare time, I enjoy working on Android apps, graphics computing, and game development.

Before starting my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2024. I have also served as a Teaching Assistant at UTSC for over three years.

During my down time, I am a competent Badminton 🏸 Player :). I actively play the Monster Hunter Series 🐉⚔️, Hollow Knight (Silk Song Hype) 💀, Balatro 🃏, and Arknights 🛥️. I am also happily married ❤️💍❤️ with Linghe (Flora) Zhao.

Selected Publications

USENIX Security

GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical

Chris S. Lin, Joyce Qu, and Gururaj Saileshwar

In 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 25), 2025

arXiv Code Website

HPCA

QPRAC: Towards Secure and Practical PRAC-based Rowhammer Mitigation using Priority Queues

Jeonghyun Woo, Shaopeng Chris Lin, Prashant J. Nair, Aamer Jaleel, and Gururaj Saileshwar

In 2025 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2025

Distinguished Artifact Award 🏅

DOI arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{QRPAC,
  author = {Woo, Jeonghyun and Lin, Shaopeng Chris and Nair, Prashant J. and Jaleel, Aamer and Saileshwar, Gururaj},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)},
  title = {QPRAC: Towards Secure and Practical PRAC-based Rowhammer Mitigation using Priority Queues},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {1021-1037},
  keywords = {Hands;Protocols;Prevention and mitigation;Random access memory;Computer architecture;Security;Proposals;Guidelines;dram;reliability;security;rowhammer;per row activation counting},
  doi = {10.1109/HPCA61900.2025.00080},
  award_statement = {Distinguished Artifact Award 🏅},
}