Zhiao Wei

Software Engineer · MMath in Computer Science, University of Waterloo · Graduating April 2027

I build backend services in Python and program analysis tools in Java. My MMath research at Waterloo is supervised by Prof. Yousra Aafer.

Email LinkedIn GitHub

experience

Software Engineer | Research Assistant May 2025 – Present
CrySP Lab, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada
Software Engineer Intern Jan 2022 – May 2024
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) Beijing, China

education

Master of Mathematics (MMath) in Computer Science May 2025 – Apr 2027 (Expected)
University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada

publications

* denotes equal contribution.

  1. USENIX Sec ’26
    Raising the Flag: Detecting Missing Permission Controls in Mini-Program APIs
    Zhiao Wei*, Chao Wang*, Haseeb-Ur-Rehman Faheem, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security ’26), 2026
    Co-first author
    HTML PDF Code Poster
  2. ACM SaTS ’26
    Beyond the Android Oracle: Characterizing Scopes in Super Apps
    Zhiao Wei and Yousra Aafer
    In 4th Workshop on Security of Agentic and Miniapp Empowered Mobile Apps (SaTS ’26), 2026
    First author · To appear, November 2026
    Code

selected projects

PermScope

Found 183 mini-program APIs in WeChat, QQ, Alipay and Baidu that skip permission checks. Published at USENIX Security '26.

Paper ↗

Scopes in Super Apps

Analyzed 3,151 mini-program APIs in WeChat, Douyin and Alipay. Over 90% fall outside Android's permission model. First-author paper at ACM SaTS '26.

CodeMind

Hack the North 2025: our team built CodeMind, a local-first tool that turns AI coding sessions into a searchable timeline. A custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) server collects sessions from Cursor and Claude, and an OpenAI model extracts the key details and indexes them.

Devpost ↗

Code Review Hotspots

Tested whether a pull request's topic predicts which of its files reviewers comment on, over 33,596 PRs written by AI coding agents. I built the data collection and the evaluation.

Job Monitor

Tracks new-grad jobs from 106 career feeds every 15 minutes. Live dashboard, Discord alerts, on-demand LinkedIn search.

Live dashboard ↗

Coding Tracker

Spaced-repetition app for interview prep, live on AWS with GitHub sign-in and a public demo. React, FastAPI, Postgres, 260+ tests.

Live demo ↗

LoRaWAN Fuzzer

A fuzzer that sends uplinks with mutated payloads from a simulated LoRaWAN device to a ChirpStack network server and records whether a valid downlink comes back.

skills

Languages
  • Python
  • Java
  • C++
  • C
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
Backend & Web
  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • REST APIs
  • SQLAlchemy
  • Pydantic
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • React
Testing & DevOps
  • pytest
  • unittest
  • HTTP mocking
  • GitHub Actions
  • Docker
  • Git
Integrations
  • Third-party APIs
  • API reverse engineering
  • Playwright crawling
LLM Integration
  • LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek)
  • MCP servers
  • LLM test generation
Security
  • Android internals
  • Xposed hooking
  • Dynamic analysis
  • Static analysis
Forever loving my hamster 🐹