Cong WANG

Professor, Fellow of the IEEE
Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong

Office: Y6313, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (AC1)
Phone: +852 3442 2010
Fax: +852 3442 0503
Email: congwang at cityu.edu.hk

Overview

I am interested in developing secure software systems with theoretical security / privacy guarantee and practical performance. My recent work has focused on data security (e.g., encrypted databases, multi-party encrypted analytics, proofs of remote storage, etc.), AI systems and security (e.g., red teaming for LLM, federated (un)learning, robust reinforcement learning, etc.), privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g., encrypted messaging and metadata privacy, anonymous communications, encrypted network middleboxes, etc.), blockchain and decentralised applications (e.g., decentralized storage auditing, on-chain/off-chain interoperability, consensus designs, etc.), and software security and systems (e.g., hardware-assisted security, anti-fuzzing techniques, boosting performance of deep learning clusters, etc.). Please refer to the following links and the group website for more details.

Google Scholar | ORCID | Scopus | CityU Scholar

Selected Publications (Full List)

Data security and privacy

ESORICS'24 Nemesis: Combating Abusive Information in Encrypted Messaging with Private Reporting. The 29th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'24), Bydgoszcz, 16 September-20 September, 2024.
Rui Lian, Yulong Ming, Chengjun Cai, Yifeng Zheng, Cong Wang, and Xiaohua Jia.
VLDB'24 SWAT: A System-Wide Approach to Tunable Leakage Mitigation in Encrypted Data Stores. 50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB'24), Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024.
Leqian Zheng, Lei Xu, Cong Wang, Sheng Wang, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin, Feifei Li, and Kui Ren.
ICDCS'24 HiddenTor: Toward a User-Centric and Private Query System for Tor BridgeDB. The 44th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'24), Jersey City, New Jersey, 23-26 July, 2024.
Yichen Zang, Chengjun Cai, Wentao Dong, Lei Xu, and Cong Wang.
CCS'23 Leakage-Abuse Attacks Against Forward and Backward Private Searchable Symmetric Encryption. The 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'23), Copenhagen, Denmark, November 26-30, 2023.
Lei Xu, Leqian Zheng, Chengzhi XU, Xinliang Yuan, and Cong Wang.
NSDI'23 Boomerang: Metadata-Private Messaging under Hardware Trust. The 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'23), Boston, Ma, April 17-19, 2023.
Peipei Jiang, Wang Qian, Jianhao Chen, Cong Wang, Lei Xu, Xinyu Wang, Yihao Wu, Xiaoyuan Li, and Kui Ren.
TDSC Aggregation Service for Federated Learning: An Efficient, Secure, and More Resilient Realization. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 988–1001, March–April, 2023.
Yifeng Zheng, Shangqi Lai, Yi Liu, Xingliang Yuan, Xun Yi, and Cong Wang.
CCS'22 Vizard: A Metadata-hiding Data Analytics System with End-to-End Policy Controls. The 29th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'22), Los Angeles, USA, November 7-12, 2022.
Chengjun Cai, Yichen Zang, Cong Wang, Xiaohua Jia, and Qian Wang.
CCS'19 LightBox: Full- stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed. The 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'19), London, UK, November 11-15, 2019.
Huayi Duan, Cong Wang, Xingliang Yuan, Yajin Zhou, Qian Wang, and Kui Ren.
TC Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing for Secure Cloud Storage. IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 362–375, February, 2013.
Cong Wang, Sherman S.M. Chow, Qian Wang, Kui Ren, and Wenjing Lou.

AI security

KDD'24 BadSampler: Harnessing the Power of Catastrophic Forgetting to Poison Byzantine-robust Federated Learning. ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'24), Barcelona, 25-29 August, 2024.
Yi Liu, Xingliang Yuan, and Cong Wang.
MM'24 Arondight: Red Teaming Large Vision Language Models with Auto-generated Multi-modal Jailbreak Prompts. The 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia(MM'24), Melbourne, 28 October.-1 November, 2024.
Yi Liu, Chengjun Cai, Xiaoli Zhang, Xingliang Yuan, and Cong Wang.
IJCAI'24 Constrained Intrinsic Motivation for Reinforcement Learning. The 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'24), Jeju, Korea, Aug 03-09, 2024.
Xiang Zheng, Xinjun Ma, Shengjie Wang, Xinyu Wang, Chao Shen, and Cong Wang.
DSN'24 Toward Evaluating Robustness of Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Policy. The 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'24), Brisbane, Australia, June 24-27, 2024.
Xiang Zheng, Xinjun Ma, Chao Shen, and Cong Wang.
USENIX Security'24 More Simplicity for Trainers, More Opportunity for Attackers: Black-Box Attacks on Speaker Recognition Systems by Inferring Feature Extractor. The 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’24), Philadephia, PA, August 14-16, 2024.
Yunjie Ge, Pinji Chen, Qian Wang, Lingchen Zhao, Ningping Mou, Peipei Jiang, Cong Wang, Qi Li, and Chao Shen.
TIFS Proof of Unlearning: Definitions and Instantiation. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 19, pp.3309–3323, January, 2024.
Jia-Si Weng, Shenglong Yao, Yuefeng Du, Junjie Huang, Jian Weng, and Cong Wang.
SIGIR'23 Poisoning Self-supervised Learning Based Sequential Recommendations. Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'23), pp. 300-310, Taipei, July 23-27, 2023.
Yanling Wang, Yuchen Liu, Qian Wang, Cong Wang, and Chenliang Li.
ICLR'23 Bayes-MIL: A New Probabilistic Perspective on Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Images. The 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR’23), Kigali Rwanda, May 1-5, 2023.
Yufei Cui, Ziquan Liu, Xiangyu Liu, Xue Liu, Cong Wang, Tei-Wei Kuo, Jason Xue Chun, and Antoni B. Chan.
WWW'23 NetGuard: Protecting Commercial Web APIs from Model Inversion Attacks using GAN-generated Fake Samples. The Web Conference (WWW’23), Texas, TX, April 30-May 4, 2023.
Xueluan Gong, Ziyao Wang, Yanjiao Chen, Qian Wang, and Cong Wang.
NeurIPS'22 Amplifying Membership Exposure via Data Poisoning. The 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 29 Nov - 1 Dec, Vitual, 2022.
Yufei Chen, Chao Shen, Cong Wang, and Yang Zhang.
USENIX Security'22 Teacher Model Fingerprinting Attacks Against Transfer Learning. The 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'22), Boston, MA, USA, August 10-12, 2022.
Yufei Chen, Chao Shen, Cong Wang, and Yang Zhang.
INFOCOM'22 The Right to be Forgotten in Federated Learning: An Efficient Realization with Rapid Retraining. The 41st IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'22), Virtual, May 2-5, 2022.
Yi Liu, Lei Xu, Xingliang Yuan, Cong Wang, and Bo Li.
CCS'21 Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Commercial Speech Platforms with Minimal Information. The 28th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'21), Republic of Korea, November 15-19, 2021.
Baolin Zheng, Peipei Jiang, Qian Wang, Qi Li, Chao Shen, Cong Wang, Yunjie Ge, Qingyang Teng, and Shenyi Zhang.
ICML'21 CARTL: Cooperative Adversarially-Robust Transfer Learning. The 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'21), Virtual, July 18-24, 2021.
Dian Chen, Hongxin Hu, Qian Wang, Yinli Li, Cong Wang, Chao Shen, and Qi Li.
PIEEE The Security of Autonomous Driving: Threats, Defenses, and Future Directions. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 108, no. 2, pp. 357–372, February, 2020.
Kui Ren, Qian Wang, Cong Wang, Zhan Qin, and Xiaodong Lin.

Software security and systems

OJCS ShadowBug: Enhanced Synthetic Fuzzing Benchmark Generation. IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society (OJCS), vol.5, pp. 95 – 106, March, 2024.
Zhengxiang Zhou and Cong Wang.
EMNLP'23 Adaptive Gating in Mixture-of-Experts based Language Models. The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23), Singapore, 6-10 December, 2023.
Jiamin Li, Qiang Su, Yitao Yang, Yimin Jiang, Cong Wang, and Hong Xu.
USENIX Security'23 MorFuzz: Fuzzing Processor via Runtime Instruction Morphing enhanced Synchronizable Co-simulation. The 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2023), Anaheim, CA, August 9-11, 2023.
Jinyan Xu, Yiyuan Liu, Sirui He, Haoran Lin, Yajin Zhou, and Cong Wang.
USENIX ATC'23 Accelerating Distributed MoE Training and Inference with Lina. The 2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC'23), pp. 945-959, Boston, 10–12 July, 2023.
Jiamin Li, Yimin Jiang, Yibo Zhu, Cong Wang, and Hong Xu.
EuroSys'23 Lyra: Elastic Scheduling for Deep Learning Clusters. The 18th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), pp. 835-850, Rome, May 8-12, 2023.
Jiamin Li, Yimin Jiang, Yibo Zhu, Cong Wang, and Hong Xu.
OJCS Practical Anti-Fuzzing Techniques With Performance Optimization. IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society (OJCS), vol. 4, pp. 206–217, August, 2023.
Zhengxiang Zhou and Cong Wang.
USENIX Security'22 SGXLock: Towards Efficiently Establishing Mutual Distrust Between Host Application and Enclave for SGX. The 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'22), Boston, MA, USA, August 10-12, 2022.
Yuan Chen, Jiaqi Li, Guorui Xu, Yajin Zhou*, Zhi Wang, Cong Wang, and Kui Ren.
TOSEM Time-Travel Investigation: Towards Building A Scalable Attack Detection Framework on Ethereum. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 54:1– 54:33, September 2022.
Siwei Wu, Lei Wu, Yajin Zhou, Runhuai Li, Zhi Wang, Xiapu Luo, Cong Wang, Kui Ren.
TDSC WebEnclave: Protect Web Secrets from Browser Extensions with Software Enclave. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 3055-3070, September–October, 2022.
Xinyu Wang, Yuefeng Du, Cong Wang, Qian Wang, and Liming Fang.
ICPADS'18 Towards Privacy-Preserving Malware Detection Systems for Android. The 24th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'18), Sentosa, Singapore, December 11-13, 2018. (Best Paper Award)
Helei Cui, Yajin Zhou, Cong Wang, Qi Li, and Kui Ren.

Blockchain and decentralised applications

TDSC Towards Practical Auditing of Dynamic Data in Decentralized Storage. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 708–723, January–February, 2023.
Huayi Duan, Yuefeng Du, Leqian Zheng, Cong Wang, Man Ho Au, and Qian Wang.
CSUR A Survey of Blockchain Consensus Protocols. ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 55, no. 13, pp. 1–35, July, 2023.
Jie Xu, Cong Wang, and Xiaohua Jia.
ICDCS'22 Enhancing Cryptocurrency Blocklisting: A Secure, Trustless, and Effective Realization. The 42nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’22), Bolgona, Italy, July 10-13, 2022.
Yuefeng Du, Anxin Zhou, and Cong Wang.
TPDS + ICDCS'21 AdaptChain: Adaptive Scaling Blockchain With Transaction Deduplication. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1909–1922, June, 2023. (Extension from an earlier edition at ICDCS'21)
Jie Xu, Qingyuan Xie, Sen Peng, Cong Wang, and Xiaohua Jia.
TDSC + ICDCS'20 Enabling Secure and Efficient Decentralized Storage Auditing With Blockchain. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 3038–3054, September-October, 2022. (Extension from an earlier edition at ICDCS'20)
Yuefeng Du, Huayi Duan, Anxin Zhou, Cong Wang, Man Ho Au, and Qian Wang.
TDSC + INFOCOM'20 Toward a Secure, Rich, and Fair Query Service for Light Clients on Public Blockchains. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 3640–3655, November-December, 2022. (Extension from an earlier edition at INFOCOM'20).
Chengjun Cai, Lei Xu, Anxin Zhou, and Cong Wang.
PERCOM'19 Aggregating Crowd Wisdom via Blockchain: A Private, Correct, and Robust Realization. The 17th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'19), Kyoto, Japan, March 11-15, 2019.
Huayi Duan, Yifeng Zheng, Yuefeng Du, Anxing Zhou, Cong Wang, and Man Ho Au.
INFOCOM'18 Searching an Encrypted Cloud Meets Blockchain: A Decentralized, Reliable and Fair Realization. The 37th International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'18), Honolulu, HI, USA, April 15-19, 2018.
Shengshan Hu, Chengjun Cai, Qian Wang, Cong Wang, Xiangyang Luo, and Kui Ren.

Patents

Cong Wang, Xinyu Wang, and Yuefeng Du. "Secure Web Enclave". US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US11,586,726. Feb 21, 2023.
Cong Wang, Yifeng Zheng, Chengjun Cai, "System and Method for Processing Data and Managing Information", US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US11,580,417. Feb 14, 2023.
Cong Wang, Helei Cui, and Huayi Duan, "Method for Accelerating Execution of Application in a Trusted Execution Environment", US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US11,392,724. Jul 19, 2022.
Cong Wang, Xingliang Yuan, and Chengjun Cai, "An Electronic Storage System and A Method of Data Management", US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US11,170,114. Nov 09, 2021.
Cong Wang, Sarana Nutanong, Xingliang Yuan, Xinyu Wang, and Chenyun Yu, "Systems and Methods for Privacy-assured Similarity Joins over Encrypted Datasets", US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US10,496,638. Dec 03, 2019.
Xingliang Yuan, Yu Guo, Xinyu Wang, and Cong Wang, "Method for Operating a Distributed Key-Value Store", US Patent, granted, Patent No.: US10,476,662. Nov 12, 2019.
Kurt Partridge, Ersin Uzun, Cong Wang, and Manas Pathak, "Privacy-Preserving Behavior Targeting for Digital Coupons", US patent, granted US8874485 B2, Oct 28, 2014. Online at http://www.google.com/patents/US8874485.
Manas Pathak, Richard Chow, Elaine Shi, and Cong Wang, "Privacy-preserving Collaborative Filtering", US Patent, granted US8478768 B1, Jul 2, 2013. Online at https://www.google.com/patents/US8478768.

Group Members

Current Students

PhD students: Xiangyi Meng (2018.08~), Yichen Zang (2020.09~), Xiang Zheng (CityU Presidential Scholarship, 2020.09~), Wentao Dong (2021.01~), Xinyan Li (2021.09~), Rui Lian (2021.09~), Leqian Zheng (HK PhD Fellowship, 2021.09~), Sirui He (2021.09~), Yi Liu (2022.09~), Longxiang Wang (2023.09~), Shengchen Lin (2024.09~).
Postdoc fellows: Yufei Chen, Yuefeng Du, Tao Ni, Haiwei Wu.

CityU Alumni (Full List)

Xingliang Yuan, PhD, 2016, first employment: Lecturer (Assistant professor), Monash University, Australia; now Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne.
Jinghua Jiang, PhD, 2017, first employment: Senior engineer, Baidu Shenzhen, China.
Chengcheng Dai, PhD, 2017, first employment: Research engineer, Huawei Hangzhou, China.
Yu Zhang, Postdoc, 2016~2017, current employment: Senior Lecturer, Griffith University, Australia.
Zhenkui Shi, PhD, 2018, first employment: Lecturer, Guangxi Normal University, China.
Helei Cui, PhD, 2018, first employment: Senior Research Associate, City University of Hong Kong; now Full Professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University, China.
Yifeng Zheng, PhD, 2019, first employment: Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO Data61, Sydney, Australia, and now Assistant Professor at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), Shenzhen, China.
Yu Guo, PhD, 2019, first employment: Postdoc, City University of Hong Kong; now Associate Professor at Beijing Normal University, China.
Lei Xu, Postdoc, 2021~2022, and RA, 2019~2020, City University of Hong Kong; now Associate Professor at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China.
Huayi Duan, PhD, 2020, first employment: Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Xinyu Wang, PhD, 2021, first employment: Software engineer, Tencent, Shenzhen, China
Lingchen Zhao, Postdoc, 2021~2022, current employment: Associate Professor, Wuhan University, China.
Jiasi Weng, Postdoc, 2021~2022, RA, 2019~2020, current employment: Associate Professor, Jinan University, China.
Chengjun Cai, PhD, 2021, first employment: Postdoc, City University of Hong Kong; now Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan).
Yuefeng Du, PhD, 2022, first employment: Postdoc, City University of Hong Kong
Jiamin Li, PhD, 2024, first employment: Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia – Vancouver
Zhengxiang Zhou, PhD, 2024, first employment: Software engineer, Bytedance, Shenzhen, China

Selected Awards and Honors

Stanford's Top 2% Most Highly Cited Scientists, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
Member of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Expert Group, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, 2023
RGC Research Fellow, 2021
Elevation to IEEE Fellow, 2020
Best Paper Award, IEEE ICDCS 2020
IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award, 2020
The President's Awards 2019, City University of Hong Kong, 2019
Outstanding Research Award, City University of Hong Kong, 2019
First Place Award, The 2019 iDASH Genome Privacy & Security Competition, National Institute of Health (NIH) and Indiana University, 2019
Best Paper Award, IEEE ICPADS 2018, "Towards Privacy-Preserving Malware Detection Systems for Android", by H. Cui, Y. Zhou, C. Wang, Q. Li, and K. Ren.
Outstanding Supervisor Award, City University of Hong Kong, 2017 (Awarded on 11 Dec. 2017)
The Founding Members of the Young Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, 2017.
The President's Awards 2016, City University of Hong Kong, 2017.
Best Student Paper Award for IEEE ICDCS 2017, "You Can Hear But You Cannot Steal: Defending Against Voice Impersonation Attacks on Smartphones", by S. Chen, K. Ren, S. Piao, C. Wang, Q. Wang, J. Weng, L. Su, and A. Mohaisen.
Best Paper Award for IEEE MSN 2015, "Towards Secure and Practical Targeted Mobile Advertising", by J. Jiang, X. Gui, Z. Shi, X. Yuan, and C. Wang.

Selected Recent Grants

"Rethinking Leakages in Dynamic Encrypted Database: Exploitation, Quantification, and Mitigation", GRF, PI, Duration: 2025.01~2027.12.
"Towards Security Assessment and Privacy Enhancement of Artificial Intelligence Algorithms in Finance", MHKJFS (Mainland-Hong Kong Joint Funding Scheme), PI, Duration: Sep 2024~Aug 2026.
"Enabling Metadata-private and Accountable Networks at Scale", HK CRF, PC, Duration: June 2023~May 2026.
"Building Privacy-assured and Scalable Encrypted Databases with Secure Enclaves", HK RFS, PI, Duration: 2022.01~2027.12.
"Towards Secure, Dynamic, and Practical Auditing for Decentralized Storage Network", GRF, PI, Duration: 2022.01~2024.12.

Teaching

Course materials available at CityU Canvas.

CS 4394, Information Security and Management, Semester A, 2021, Co-instructor
CS 5294, Information Security Technology Management, Semester A, 2021, Course Leader
CS 6290, Privacy-enhancing Technologies (TPg), Semester B, 2017-2021, Course Leader
CS 5222, Computer Networks and Internet (TPg), Semester A, 2012-2019, Course Leader
CS 4293, Topics on Computer Security (Ug), Semester B, 2013, 2015-2021, Course Leader
CS 5293, Topics on Information Security (TPg), Semester B, 2013, 2015-2017, Course Leader
GE 2323, Mobile Social Networks: Practices, Challenges, and Beyond (Ug), Semester B, 2013, Course Leader
CS 3391, Advanced Programming (Ug), Semester B, 2015-2021, Co-instructor

Selected Professional Services

Editorships

Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), Jan. 2023

Conference Organizing Committee

TPC, USENIX Security 2023 - 2025
Finance and Registration Chair, ICDCS 2023
TPC Co-Chair, The 16th EAI International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness (QShine 2020)
TPC Co-Chair, The 3rd IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC 2019)
TPC Co-Chair, The 12th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2018)

Some Useful Links

Computer Security Conference Ranking and Statistic
- http://jianying.space/conference-ranking.html
- http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/guofei/sec_conf_stat.htm
Networking Conferences Statistics (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/conf/stats/)
A Wiki for Calls For Papers (http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/)