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 coming to WashU, I graduated from Sichuan University (SCU) with a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity in 2021. During my undergraduate studies, I also spent half a year at National University of Singapore (NUS) as an exchange student. Last summer, I was an AI research intern at Palo Alto Networks where I focused on AI for security research.

Research Interests: I am interested in the broad intersection of system security and ML systems. My recent research focuses on identifying and addressing the security and privacy challenges faced by emerging learning-enabled systems, such as LLM-based systems, through system design and ML approaches.

I am expected to graduate in May 2025 and am actively seeking full-time opportunities for research/applied/data scientist positions. Please feel free to contact me.

Selected Publications

System/ML System Security

IsolateGPT: An Execution Isolation Architecture for LLM-Based 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

Data Exposure from LLM Apps: An In-depth Investigation of OpenAI’s GPTs [PDF] [The Register]
Y. Wu*, E. Jaff*, N. Zhang, U. Iqbal (*Co-first Author)
arXiv:2408.13247, 2024

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

ML for Security

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

  • USENIX Security Student Travel Grant, 2024
  • IEEE S&P Student Travel Grant, 2024
  • ESI Hot Paper, 2022
  • ESI Highly Cited Paper, 2021
  • 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

Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2023, 2024
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2022, 2023, 2024
  • Knowledge-Based Systems, 2024
  • Complex & Intelligent Systems (CAIS), 2021, 2023, 2024
  • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), 2023
  • IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), 2023
  • IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE), 2021
  • Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications (PPNA), 2021

Artifact Evaluation Committee

  • USENIX Security Symposium, 2024

Conference Reviewer/Sub-reviewer

  • IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2023
  • IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2020

External Reviewer

  • USENIX Security Symposium, 2024
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2022, 2023
  • The Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS), 2022
  • IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), 2024
  • The Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2022, 2023
  • IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2022, 2023
  • ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2022, 2024
  • IEEE European Symposium of Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2023
  • Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2023

Volunteer

  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2022

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