Research

I work on formal methods for cyber-physical systems (CPS), with a focus on relational verification as a unifying technique for reasoning about the quantitative safety and security of systems that interact with the physical world. Rather than asking only whether a system is safe, my work asks how safe — by how much a system can degrade, tolerate attacks, or deviate from a reference and still meet its guarantees — and develops rigorous, often machine-checked, methods to prove such quantitative properties by relating a system to a reference or to itself.

My research areas include:

• Formal methods for security
• Language-based security
• Information-flow analysis
• Verification of Cyber-physical systems
• More details...

Recent Publications

• Sensor Tolerance Contracts for Safety Assurance in Cyber-Physical Systems, NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM'26).
  Jian Xiang.
• Formal Robustness for Cyber-Physical Systems under Timed Attacks, Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF'25).
  Jian Xiang , Simone Tini, Ruggero Lanotte, and Massimo Merro.
• Extending Dynamic Logics with First-Class Relational Reasoning, NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM'25).
  Jian Xiang and Stephen Chong.
• Measuring Robustness in Cyber-Physical Systems under Sensor Attacks, Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems
  Jian Xiang , Ruggero Lanotte, Simone Tini, Stephen Chong, and Massimo Merro.
• Quantitative Robustness Analysis of Sensor Attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems, HSCC'23
  Stephen Chong, Ruggero Lanotte, Massimo Merro, Simone Tini, and Jian Xiang .
• Co-Inflow: Coarse-grained Information Flow Control for Java-like Languages , Oakland 2021
  Jian Xiang and Stephen Chong.
• More details...

Prospective students

I am looking for self-motivated Ph.D students who are interested in building secure systems with formal methods. Please read this page before contacting me.

Some useful resources for students can be found here.

Group

• Tahmid Chowdhury (PhD)
• Utkarsh Parashar (Master)
• Sai Phanindra Kothuri (Master)
• Ramnarayanan Sankar (Alumni)

Teaching

In Spring 2026 I am teaching

• ITIS 3200 - (Introduction of Information Security and Privacy)
• ITIS 6200 / 8200- (Principles of Information Security and Privacy)

at UNC Charlotte.

Office Hours

My office hours are typically individual meetings. I have regular office hours scheduled each week. Office hours are drop-in (no appointment needed). If you are unable to attend my office hours, you are welcome to email me to arrange an appointment. Appointments can be either in person (Woodward 330D) or on Zoom. For Zoom meetings, please use this URL to join: https://charlotte-edu.zoom.us/my/jxiang1.

I also will have research office hours available each week. You are welcomed to drop-in and discuss about research ideas, projects, and collaboration. You can find the my schedule here.

Short Bio

I am an assistant professor at the department of Software & Information System in the College of Computing and Informatics. I spent a few years as a Research Associate (Postdoctoral Researcher) in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University working with Stephen Chong and his group. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, under the supervision of John Knight and Kevin Sullivan.

Email is the best way to contact me: jian.xiang@charlotte.edu .

My CV can be found here