Zou Jinpei holds a Master’s and PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He also serves as the Director of the Master of Science program and oversees the Master of Data Science program.
After completing his PhD in the United States, Professor Zou embarked on his academic career at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. His pioneering contribution came in co-founding HARNET—the first academic and research network among Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions. In his early research years, Professor Zou successfully applied expert system technology to develop innovative solutions, including an employee scheduling system for a local airline, a garbage collection vehicle dispatch system for the Regional Services Department, and even a cutting-edge fault diagnosis system for air-conditioning units.
Between 1994 and 1997, Professor Zou, along with several experts and a team of software engineers, collaborated to develop a search engine for Hong Kong Telecom’s “108 Directory Assistance” system, leveraging cutting-edge in-memory database and distributed computing technologies of the time.
Since 1997, Professor Zou has served as the Director of the Center for Information Security and Cryptography Research (CISC) at the University of Hong Kong, focusing on the fields of digital forensics and information security.
From 1997 to 2002, he managed several cryptographic system development projects, including the Strong Cryptography Library (SCL), the Strong Cryptographic Infrastructure for E-commerce, and secure electronic document storage.
In recent years, Professor Zou has shifted his research interests toward computer forensics and digital investigations, with areas of focus including computer forensics, cryptography, computer security, network monitoring, and privacy. He currently serves as the Chair of IFIP’s Digital Forensics WG11.9, Chairman of the Information Security and Forensics Society (ISFS), a member of the IT Division of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, a board member of the Hong Kong Association of Forensic Sciences, and a committee member of the International Symposium on Computer Forensics (SADFE). He is also the chief architect of the computer forensics tool "Shu Jian" (Digital Evidence Search Kit, or DESK) and was awarded the Knowledge Exchange Award by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong in 2003.
In addition to developing forensic tools, Professor Zou is also deeply committed to digital forensics and investigative research, covering areas such as live system analysis, Bayesian-model-based digital evidence analysis, digital crime scene reconstruction, and software vulnerability assessment. He has conducted in-depth studies on buffer overflow attack techniques and their defenses. Professor Zou has published numerous research papers on these topics at both local and international conferences and in academic journals—two of which even earned him the prestigious Best Paper Award at the renowned Digital Forensics Research Conference in the U.S. in 2008 and 2011. Moreover, his paper titled "The Rules of Time on NTFS File System" has been repeatedly submitted to Hong Kong courts as supporting documentation for expert reports.
Since 2004, Professor Zou has been consistently invited to assist courts and Hong Kong law enforcement agencies as a computer forensics expert, providing lawyers with expert advice on the interpretation and understanding of digital evidence in both criminal and civil proceedings in Hong Kong. In criminal cases, his expertise has been applied to areas such as child pornography, software copyright infringement, email analysis, and online fraud. In civil litigation, his work has included activities like analyzing event log timestamps and conducting internal investigations into cases involving internal theft. Additionally, in the realm of intellectual property, he has supported Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Customs in conducting digital forensic analyses for cases related to software copying and adaptation. He has also provided digital investigation and forensic services to numerous companies facing potential risks of internal IP theft—ranging from software piracy to the unauthorized replication of CAD designs—and has even assisted Hong Kong police in probing cryptocurrency-related fraud cases.
Since 2020, Professor Zou has been focusing on analyzing cases involving Bitcoin and the Telegram platform. He has conducted in-depth analyses of hardware Bitcoin wallets, Bitcoin mixers, and Bitcoin double-spending schemes, while also meticulously investigating Telegram’s private groups and channels. Based on this work, he has prepared expert reports and provided professional insights.
For more information about Professor Zou's personal profile and research achievements, please visit the link below:
https://i.cs.hku.hk/~chow/
https://www.cs.hku.hk/index.php/people/academic-staff/chow
https://www.ecom-icom.hku.hk/Instructors/chow-k-p
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