I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. My research interests are to discover and understand critical security issues in a large system through data-oriented security analysis, and also to design and develop innovative solutions to address these issues.
Opportunities: I’m looking for self-motivated PhD students interested in trustworthy machine learning systems, privacy compliance, or threat intelligence. If you are passionate about these areas, consider applying to the PhD or MSCS program at UIUC and joining my group.
Recent Research Areas & Interests:
Selected Awards and Honors:
NEWS:
Opportunities: I’m looking for self-motivated PhD students interested in trustworthy machine learning systems, privacy compliance, or threat intelligence. If you are passionate about these areas, consider applying to the PhD or MSCS program at UIUC and joining my group.
Recent Research Areas & Interests:
- Privacy compliance and enforcement: [NDSS'25-1],[NDSS'25-2],[CCS'24-1],[CCS'24-2],[SCORED'24],[Security'24],[Security'23-1], [Security'23-2], [SIGMETRICS'23],[Security'21-2]
- Secure machine learning systems: [NDSS'26],[CCS'25],[Security'24-1],[CCS'24-3],[S&P'24], [CCS'23-2],[CCS'21],[S&P'19-1]
- Cyber Threat intelligence, including threat intelligence gathering and analysis: [NDSS'25-3] [NDSS'24],[Security'21-1],[NDSS'20],[Security'18],[CCS'16]; dark web monitoring: [NDSS'24], [JMIR'21], [Security'18]; threat artifacts (a.k.a., cybercrime) on the Web [CCS'23-3][NDSS'22][NDSS'18][S&P'16][WWW'16][ACSAC'16], Mobile systems [CCS'24-4],[S&P'22-2],[NDSS'21],[Security'19-1], Network systems [S&P19-2][S&P'17][CCS'16], DevOp platforms [S&P'22-1], and Ethereum [Security'21-1]
- NLP/ML-assisted vulnerability discovery: [Security'22][CCS'20-3][CCS'20-2][CCS'20-1][Security'19-3][NDSS'19][CCS'17][CCS'15], assessment [Security'22][Security'19-2], and management [CCS'23-1]
Selected Awards and Honors:
- NSF CAREER Award (2024)
- Amazon Research Award (2025); Meta Privacy-Enhancing Technology Research Award (2021)
- ACM CCS Distinguished Paper Award (2025); ISOC NDSS Distinguished Artifact Award (2025); ISOC NDSS Distinguished Paper Award (2019)
- ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award, Runner-up (2018)
NEWS:
- (10/15/2025) Thrilled to share that our paper on understanding convention implications of web bots in LLM era has received the ACM CCS 2025 Distinguished Paper Award!
- (8/2/2025) Huge congratulations to Jian Cui and Zichuan (Team Hoosiers) for wining 1st place in the AgentX - LLM Agents MOOC Competition 2025 (AI Safety & Alignment Track). Kudos to the team!
- (7/20/2025) Zilong has successfully passed his PhD dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Lin!
- (04/04/2025) Ece has successfully passed her PhD dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Gumusel!
- (03/09/2025) Haoran has successfully passed his PhD dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Lu!
- (02/26/2025) JBOMAudit has been awarded the NDSS 2025 Distinguished Artifact Award! Congratulations, team!
- (02/12/2025) Jian Cui and Zichuan (Team Hoosiers) secured 2nd place in the Berkeley LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon 2024 (Safety Track) for their innovative LLM agent attack project. Congratulations!
- (11/11/2024) Malla has been selected as a Top 15 finalist in the 2024 CSAW Applied Research Competition.
- (06/26/2024) Yue Xiao's PhD dissertation has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Indiana University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. Congratulations, Yue, on this outstanding achievement!
- (06/05/2024) Thrilled to announce that Yue Qin, Yue Xiao and Zhengyi Li have successfully passed their PhD dissertation defenses this summer. Well done, doctors!
- (05/01/2024) Our paper ''Towards Privacy-Preserving Social-Media SDKs on Android" has been awarded all three artifact evaluation badges in the USENIX Security’24 Artifact Evaluation. Excellent!
- (04/15/2024 ) "Lorie in Cybersecurity Wonderland" has been chosen for exhibition at the Shanghai Illustration Art Festival, to be held at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition Center.
- (03/05/2024) Honored to receive the NSF CAREER Award to support the research on privacy-accountable mobile software supply chain. Thanks NSF!
- (10/23/2023) Thrilled to announce that I was selected as a Luddy Faculty Fellow.
- (09/01/2023) I have taken the role of of General Co-Chair for ACM CCS 2024.
- (08/24/2023) Lalaine has been selected for showcasing in the 2023 NSA CAE-R Research Symposium.
- (06/30/2023) The proposal "Towards Safeguarding the Emerging Miniapp Paradigm in Mobile Super Apps" was awarded by NSF. Thanks NSF!
- (03/31/2023) Thrilled to announce that I received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award for 2023.
- (01/13/2023) I will serve as ACSAC 2023 Artifacts Evaluation co-Chair. Please check out the Call for Paper Artifacts.