Biography: I am Yuhao Wu, a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), fortunate to be advised by Umar Iqbal and Ning Zhang. Before joining WashU, I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from Sichuan University (SCU) in 2021. During my undergraduate studies, I also spent a semester as an exchange student at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Last summer, I worked as an AI research intern at Palo Alto Networks, where I focused on AI-driven security research.
Research Interests: I am interested in the broad intersection of security, privacy, and ML systems. My recent research focuses on identifying and addressing the security and privacy challenges of emerging ML-enabled systems, such as LLM-based agentic systems, through novel system design and ML-driven solutions.
Updates:
- I am on the market and look for a full time job!
- I am selected as ML and Systems Rising Star ’25!
- I am reviewing for the RAID ’25. Consider submitting your work!
- I presented our research on execution isolation in agentic systems at MSR.
- Our work on execution isolation in agentic systems has been accepted by NDSS ’25.
- Our research on measuring data exposure in LLM apps has been reported by The Register.
Selected Publications
Please see Google Scholar for more recent works and arXiv papers.
ML and System Security
IsolateGPT: An Execution Isolation Architecture for LLM-Based Agentic Systems [PDF] [Poster (S&P)]
Y. Wu, F. Roesner, T. Kohno, N. Zhang, U. Iqbal
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2025
Your Firmware Has Arrived: A Study of Firmware Update Vulnerabilities [PDF]
Y. Wu, J. Wang, Y. Wang, S. Zhai, Z. Li, Y. He, K. Sun, Q. Li, and N. Zhang
USENIX Security Symposium, 2024
An In-Depth Investigation of Data Collection in LLM App Ecosystems [The Register]
Y. Wu, E. Jaff, K. Yang, N. Zhang, U. Iqbal
In Submission, 2025
IP Protection in TinyML [PDF]
Y. Wu*, J. Wang*, H. Liu, B. Yuan, R. Chamberlain, and N. Zhang (*Co-first Author)
IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2023
Work-in-Progress: Measuring Security Protection in Real-time Embedded Firmware [PDF]
Y. Wu, Y. Wang, S. Zhai, Z. Li, A. Li, J. Wang, and N. Zhang
IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), 2022
Adversarial ML
Please Tell Me More: Privacy Impact of Explainability through the Lens of Membership Inference Attack [PDF]
H. Liu, Y. Wu, Z. Yu, and N. Zhang
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2024
CodeIPPrompt: Intellectual Property Infringement Assessment of Code Language Models [PDF] [Poster (S&P)]
Z. Yu, Y. Wu, N. Zhang, C. Wang, Y. Vorobeychik, and C. Xiao
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023
SlowLiDAR: Increasing the Latency of LiDAR-Based Detection Using Adversarial Examples [PDF]
H. Liu, Y. Wu, Z. Yu, Y. Vorobeychik, and N. Zhang
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023
RIATIG: Reliable and Imperceptible Adversarial Text-to-Image Generation with Natural Prompts [PDF]
H. Liu, Y. Wu, S. Zhai, B. Yuan, and N. Zhang
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023
Anti-Honeypot Enabled Optimal Attack Strategy for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems [PDF]
B. Li, Y. Xiao, Y. Shi, Q. Kong, Y. Wu, and H. Bao
IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society (OJ-CS), 2020
Data-Driven Security
Federated Learning for Distributed Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks [Book]
Q. Du, B. Li, Z. Shao, Y. Wu, and C. Yang
Advanced Machine Learning for Cyber-Attack Detection in IoT Networks, Chapter 4. Elsevier, 2025
A Novel Framework for Detecting Social Bots with Deep Neural Networks and Active Learning [PDF]
Y. Wu, Y. Fang, S. Shang, J. Jin, L. Wei, and H. Wang
Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), 2021
DeepFed: Federated Deep Learning For Intrusion Detection in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems [PDF]
B. Li, Y. Wu, J. Song, R. Lu, T. Li, and L. Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), 2020 (ESI Hot Paper, ESI Highly Cited Paper)
Detecting Social Spammers in Sina Weibo Using Extreme Deep Factorization Machine [PDF]
Y. Wu, Y. Fang, S. Shang, L. Wei, J. Jin, and H. Wang
International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE), 2020
ReAL: A New ResNet-ALSTM Based Intrusion Detection System for the Internet of Energy [PDF]
J. Song, B. Li, Y. Wu, Y. Shi, and A. Li
IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2020
Awards & Honors
- ML and Systems Rising Star, 2025
- USENIX Security Student Travel Grant, 2024
- IEEE S&P Student Travel Grant, 2024
- ESI Hot Paper, 2022
- ESI Highly Cited Paper, 2021 – 2025
- National Scholarship (Awarded by MoE, China; 0.2% of Chinese undergraduate students), 2020
- First Prize Scholarship (Awarded by SCU; Top 1%), 2020
- Outstanding Graduate Honor (Awarded by SCU; Top 10%), 2020
- Outstanding Student Honor (Awarded by SCU; Top 10%), 2019
Selected Services
Technical Program Committee
- International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), 2025
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
- IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2025
- International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2025
- ICLR Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild, 2025
- Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
- USENIX Security Symposium (Artifact Evaluation), 2024
- ICML Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild, 2024
- ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models, 2024
- CVPR Workshop on Synthetic Data for Computer Vision, 2024
- IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2023
- IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2020
Journal Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2023 – 2025
- IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2022 – 2025
- Complex & Intelligent Systems (CAIS), 2021 – 2025
- ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 2024, 2025
- IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE), 2021, 2024
- IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS), 2024
- IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2024
- ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2024
- Knowledge-Based Systems, 2024
- IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), 2023
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), 2023
- Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications (PPNA), 2021
External Reviewer
- USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, DAC, RTAS, ASIACCS, EuroS&P, ACSAC, etc.
Vulnerabilities Found
- CVE-2022-38956, CVE-2022-46422, CVE-2022-46423, CVE-2022-46424, CVE-2023-23110, CVE-2023-40879, CVE-2022-38873, CVE-2023-40878, CVE-2022-46139, CVE-2022-46428, CVE-2022-46430, CVE-2022-46432, CVE-2022-46434, CVE-2022-46435, CVE-2022-46910, CVE-2022-46912, CVE-2022-46914, CVE-2023-23119, CVE-2023-40881, CVE-2023-23120, CVE-2023-40881, CVE-2023-40882, CVE-2023-40884, CVE-2023-40885, PSV-2022-0183