I am Liu Zhang, a Research Fellow at the SYmmetric cryptography and machine Learning Lab (SyLLab), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where I have been working since February 2025 under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Peyrin. I received my Ph.D. degree in December 2024 from the School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, supervised by Prof. Zilong Wang. From October 2022 to September 2024, I was a visiting Ph.D. student at NTU’s School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, supervised by Prof. Jian Guo and supported by the China Scholarship Council.

My research focuses on symmetric cryptanalysis and the use of artificial intelligence to support cryptographic research. In my current postdoctoral work, I also contribute to Open Cryptanalysis Perform (OCP), an open-source platform for constraint programming. Looking forward, more of my work will focus on large-language-model-based agents for symmetric cryptanalysis and the broader direction of AI for cryptography.

🔥 News

• 2026.01: The paper “Neural-inspired Advances in Integral Cryptanalysis” is accpted by Eurocrypt 2026.
• 2023.08: The paper “More insight on deep learning-aided cryptanalysis” is accpted by Asiacrypt 2023.

💻 Work Experiences

• 2025.02 - present, Research Fellow in Nanyang Technological University, Supervised by Thomas Peyrin.

📖 Educations

• 2022.10 - 2024.09, Visiting PhD Student, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Supervised by Jian Guo.
• 2021.09 - 2024.12, PhD Student, School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Supervised by Zilong Wang.
• 2017.09 - 2020.06, Master, Colloge of Engineering, Shantou University, Supervised by Yindong Chen.
• 2013.09 - 2017.06, Undergraduate, School of Computer and Inforamtion Technology, Xinyang Normal University.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2019.10 National Scholarship (Master).
• 2018.10 National Scholarship (Master).
• 2015.10 National Inspirational Scholarship (Undergraduate).