Graduated PhD Students


Yu-Han (Hannah) Cyberey
Co-advised with Yangfeng Ji
Fall 2019 – Summer 2025
PhD in Computer Science, August 2025
PhD Dissertation: Sensitivity Auditing for Trustworthy Language Models
Postdoc, UVA School of Data Science

Anshuman Suri
Fall 2019 – Summer 2024
PhD in Computer Science, May 2024
PhD Dissertation: Inference Privacy in Machine Learning
Postdoc, Northeastern

Josephine Lamp
Co-advised with Lu Feng
Fall 2018 – Spring 2024
PhD in Computer Science, May 2024
PhD Dissertation: Trustworthy Clinical Decision Support Systems for Medical Trajectories
Dexcom, Inc.

Fnu Suya
Co-advised with Yuan Tian
Fall 2017 – Summer 2023
PhD in Computer Science, August 2023
PhD Dissertation: On the Limits of Data Poisoning Attacks
Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Bargav Jayaraman
Fall 2016 – Fall 2022
PhD in Computer Science, Dec 2022
PhD Dissertation: Analyzing the Leaky Cauldron: Inference Attacks on Machine Learning
Meta AI Lab

Xiao Zhang
Summer 2018 – Fall 2022
PhD in Computer Science, May 2022
PhD Dissertation: From Characterizing Intrinsic Robustness to Adversarially Robust Machine Learning
Tenure-track faculty, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Weilin Xu
Co-advised with Yanjun Qi
Fall 2013 – Spring 2019
PhD in Computer Science, May 2019
PhD Dissertation: Improving Robustness of Machine Learning Models using Domain Knowledge
Intel (Adversarial Machine Learning Research, Hillsboro, OR)

Samee Zahur
Spring 2016
PhD in Computer Science, May 2016
PhD Dissertation: Demystifying Secure Computation: Familiar Abstractions for Efficient Protocols
Google

Yuchen Zhou
Spring 2015
PhD in Computer Engineering, May 2015
PhD Dissertation: Improving Security and Privacy of Integrated Web Applications
Palo Alto Networks; Facebook

Yan Huang
Fall 2012
PhD in Computer Engineering, August 2012
PhD Dissertation: Practical Secure Two-Party Computation
Associate Professor, Indiana University

Karsten Nohl
Spring 2009
PhD in Computer Engineering, May 2009
PhD Dissertation: Implementable Privacy for RFID Systems
Chief Scientist, Security Research Labs

Nathanael Paul
Spring 2008
PhD in Computer Science, May 2008
PhD Dissertation: Disk-Level Malware Detection
Gemini (previously DexCom, University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Lab; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Jinlin Yang
Spring 2007
PhD in Computer Science, May 2007
PhD Dissertation: Automatic Inference and Effective Application of Temporal Specifications
Snapchat (previously Microsoft)

PhD Students


Elena (Minjun) Long
Since Fall 2022
privacy of ad ecosystem

Mingtian Tan
Co-advised with Tom Hartsvigsen
Since Spring 2024
LLMs and time series data

Undergraduate Researchers

Alexander Chung
Since Fall 2025
Security Rules
Nia Mucher
Since Fall 2025
Auditing AI Image Generators
Alumni

Sicheng Zhu
Pre-Doctoral Visitor
Fall 2019 – Summer 2020
robust machine learning
University of Maryland PhD Student

Mohammad Etemad
Post-Doctoral Visitor
2016 – 2017
Google
PhD Koc University, Turkey

Mahnush Movahedi
Post-Doctoral Visitor
Spring 2016
Yale University, Dfinity, Facebook
PhD from University of New Mexico

Muhammad Naveed
Pre-Doctoral Visitor
Summer 2013
Graduate student visit while PhD student at UIUC
Assistant Professor at University of Southern Californa
SRG lunch
Security Research Group Lunch (12 December 2017)
Haina Li, Felix Park, Mainuddin Jonas, Anant Kharkar, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Fnu Suya, David Evans, Yuan Tian, Riley Spahn, Weilin Xu, Guy “Jack” Verrier


Zihao Su
Pre-Doctoral Visitor
Fall 2021 – Summer 2022
inference privacy, VR security
UC Santa Barbara PhD Student
Yiran Yao
Pre-Doctoral Visitor
Summer 2021
adversarial training
Yulong Tian
Pre-Doctoral Visitor
Since Fall 2020
hiding machine learning backdoors

Graduated Masters Students

Michael Jerge
LLM reliability – MCS Spring 2025
Pitfalls in Evaluating Inference-time Methods for Improving LLM Reliability
Amazon
Archit Uniyal
Fall 2022
privacy for NLP
Mainuddin Jonas
MCS December 2019
Certifying Joint Adversarial Robustness for Model Ensembles
Google
Ethan Lowman
BACS 2018; MS 2019
Principled Selective Ad Blocking with Taint-Based Exfiltration Protection Policies
Datadog
Hannah Li
BACS 2015; MS 2017
Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids
Facebook
Longze Chen
MCS 2015
Center for Open Science
Simon Sibomana
MCS 2015
ComzAfrica
Ivan Alagenchev
MCS 2014
ArktikFox: The Case for Contextual Security Policies
Amazon
Tianhao Tong
MCS 2013
GuarDroid: A Trusted Path for Password Entry
Twitter
Yikan Chen
2009 – 2011
Auditing Information Leakage for Distance Metrics
Amazon
Jeffrey Shirley
MCS 2011
The User is Not the Enemy: Fighting Malware by Tracking User Intentions
Benjamin Cox
MCS 2006
Security through Redundant Data Diversity
Northrop Grumman
Ana Nora Sovarel
MCS 2006
Automatic Identification and Protection of Security-Critical Data
University of Virginia Medical Informatics
Lingxuan Hu
2002 – 2004
Localization for Mobile Sensor Networks
Microsoft
Selvin George
MCS 2003
Biological Programming Model for Self-Healing
Uber
Greg Yukl
MCS 2003
In-Line Source Code Generation
David Larochelle
MCS 2002
Detecting Likely Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania
Joel Winstead
MS 2002
Structured Exception Semantics for Parallel Loops
Cigital
Weilin Zhong
MCS 2002
When Ants Attack: Security Issues for Stigmergic Systems
Cigitial; Aspect Security

Students and Alumni at USENIX Security 2011


Undergraduate Researchers Completed PhDs

Darion Cassel
2016 – 2017
Carnegie Mellon University PhD 2023
Jack Doerner
2015 – 2016
BSCS 2015; Wizard of Oblivion
Northeastern University PhD 2022
University of Virginia Assistant Professor
William Melicher
2012 – 2013
BACS 2013
Carnegie Mellon Univeristy PhD 2019 (advised by Lujo Bauer)
Palo Alto Networks
Patrick Mutchler
2010 — 2011
BSCS 2011
Stanford University PhD 2017 (John Mitchell)
Google
Adriana Porter Felt
2006 – 2008
UC Berkeley PhD 2012 (David Wagner)
privacy protection for social networking APIs, mashup security issues
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Finalist 2008, SEAS Outstanding Student Award 2008
TR 35, CRA Video, USENIX Security PC Co-Chair 2018
Google
Matt Spear
2005 – 2006
UC Davis PhD 2010 (worked with Karl Levitt and Felix Wu on peer-to-peer networking)
Google
Christopher Frost
2003 – 2004
UCLA PhD 2010 (worked on the Featherstich File System Project with Eddie Kohler)
Google, Samsara
Jonathan McCune
2001 – 2003
Carnegie Mellon University PhD 2009 (advised by Adrian Perrig and Mike Reiter)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Honorable Mentionee in 2003
Google
John Calandrino
2002
University of North Carolina PhD 2009 (worked with James Anderson on real-time scheduling for multicore platforms)
Microsoft
William (GJ) Halfond
2002
Georgia Tech PhD 2010 (worked on web application security with Alessandro Orso)
University of Southern California, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Felipe Huici
2001
University College London PhD 2009
NEC Europe

Undergraduate Research Alumni

Brett Haas
Fall 2025 – Spring 2026
BSCS 2026
Spatial Steering for Image Descriptions
David Onks
Fall 2025 – Spring 2026
BSCS 2026
Probability Mass Aggregation on NoisyCoconut
Shinjini Bose
Spring 2024 – Spring 2025
MSCS 2026
LLM fairness
Zihan Mei
Spring 2024
LLM application privacy
Yanjin Chen
Summer 2022 – Spring 2023
inference privacy
Princeton University (Bioinformatics)
Evan Rose
Summer 2021 – Spring 2023
BSCS 2023
poisoning attacks
Northeastern University PhD (Alina Oprea)
Tingwei Zhang
Summer 2022 – Spring 2023
BACS 2023
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Cornell PhD (Vitaly Shmatikov)
Scott Hong
Summer 2022
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Meredith James
Fall 2021 – Summer 2022
inference privacy
Yifu Lu
Fall 2021 – Summer 2022
inference privacy
University of Michigan
Jinghui Tian
Summer 2022
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Isabelle Fang
Fall 2020 – Fall 2021
natural language processing
Katherine Knipmeyer
Summer 2020 – Fall 2021
evaluating privacy for machine learning
Justin Chen
Summer 2021
inference privacy
Sean Miller
Summer 2021
poisoning attacks
William Buerk
Visiting High School Student, Fall 2020 – Spring 2021
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Nick Figgins
Summer 2020 – Spring 2021
adversarial machine learning for malware classification
Anika Karpurapu
Visiting High School Student, Fall 2020 – Spring 2021
evaluating privacy for machine learning
Jack Prescott
Fall 2019 – Spring 2021
BACS 2021 (Highest Distinction)
Improved Estimation of Concentration under Lp-norm Distance Metrics using Half Spaces
Pragun Ananda
Summer 2020 – Fall 2020
natural language processing
Emily Buerk
Summer 2020 – Fall 2020
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Brian Tran
Summer 2020 – Fall 2020
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Alex Becker
Co-advised with Denis Nekipelov
Summer 2020
revealing privacy preferences
Jessie Li
Summer 2020
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Konrad Siebor
Summer 2020
black-box attacks machine learning systems
Katherine Weinschenk
Summer 2020
societal risks of AI
Erwin Wijaya
Co-advised with Denis Nekipelov
Summer 2020
revealing privacy preferences
Youssef Errami
Summer 2019 – Spring 2020
BSCS 2020
A Deeper Look into the Fairness of Differential Privacy
Cameron Lloyd
Spring 2020
BSCS 2020
Quantifying the Current Transportation Landscapes in Charlottesville to Evaluate the Effects of Shared Dockless E-Scooters on Mobility
Microsoft
Kush Patel
Fall 2019 – Spring 2020
BSCS 2020
The Effects of Clipping on Differentially Private Machine Learning
James Houghton
Co-advised with Yixin Sun
2019 – 2020
BSCS 2020
An Analysis of The Fingerprintability of Web Traffic Through obfs4
Google
Samuel Medlin
Summer 2019 – Fall 2019
BSCS Fall 2019
Inferring and Analyzing User Privacy Preferences
Jonah Weissman
Summer 2019
evaluating privacy for machine learning
Nathaiel Grevatt
2018 – 2019
secure computation and the GDPR
Aditi Narvekar
2017 – 2019
adversarial machine learning
Apple; Georgia Tech OMCS
Helen Simecek
2017 — 2019
BACS 2019
Evading Windows Malware Classifiers
Microsoft
Matthew Wallace
2018 – 2019
University of Wisconsin MS 2021
Amazon (Guardrails)
Parvesh Samayamanthula
Visiting High School Student, Summer 2018
adversarial NLP for privacy policies
Anant Kharkar
2015 – 2018
BSCS 2018
evading classifiers
Amazon; Microsoft
Jesse Nayak
Summer 2017 – 2018
BSCS 2018
oblivious substring search
Felix Park
2017 – 2018
adversarial machine learning
Amar Singh
2017 – 2018
proof-of-stake vulnerabilities
Kelvin Sparks
Fall 2017 – 2018
BSCS 2018
cryptocurrency governance
Noah Kim
Summer 2017
feature squeezing
Samuel Havron
2015 – 2017
Cornell University
Meta
Ziqi Liu
Fall 2015 – Spring 2016
BACS 2016
web security
Microsoft
Hao Bai
2014 – 2016
BSCS 2016
Harvard University MS
Karen Pan
2015 – 2016
web security
UVA Statistics
Ori Shimony
Summer 2015 – 2016
incentives and Tor
Hunter Leath
Summer 2014 – Fall 2015
BACS Fall 2015
airdispat.ch and Melange
Amazon (Cambridge, MA)
Shay Batheja
Summer 2015
learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond
Samantha Lagestee
Summer 2015
learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond
Andrew Lee
Summer 2015
learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond
Mike Verdicchio
Summer 2015
learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond
Brian Walter
Summer 2015
learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond
Corey Ames
2014 – 2015
Natnatee Dokmai
2013 – 2015
BACS 2015
Indiana University MS
Mark Hannan
Summer 2014
Michael Mahoney
Summer 2014
Kyle McGuire
Summer 2014
Rob Michaels
Summer 2014
Theo Gutman-Solo
2013 – 2014
BACS 2014
Princeton University PhD program in Operations Research
Travis Dean
Summer 2013
implementing secure computation protocols
Robert Jacobs
Summer 2013
prime numbers
Guanmei Liang
Summer 2013
Jonathan Burket
2010 – 2013
BACS 2013
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Honorable Mentionee 2013
CMU MS 2015
Apogee Research
DuoLingo
Peter Chapman
2009 – 2012
BACS 2012
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Runner-Up in 2012
CMU MS 2015
DuoLingo
Jenny Cha
Summer 2011
secure web applications
Jiamin Chen
Summer 2011
Austin DeVinney
Visiting Undergraduate Researcher, Summer 2011
secure web application framework
visiting from Radford University
Brittany Harris
Summer 2011
secure multi-party computation
SangHyung Koo
Summer 2011
secure mobile applications
Casey Mihaloew
Summer 2011
secure web aplication framework
Michael Weaver
Summer 2010 – Spring 2011
BSCS 2011
a secure web application framework
Shengxuan (Jerry) Ye
Spring 2011
CalTech (Masters in Computation and Neural Systems)
Muzzammil Zaveri
Summer 2010 – Spring 2011
BSCS 2011
a secure web application framework
Paul DiOrio
Summer 2008
linguistics and security
Richard Hsu
Summer 2008
scene-based CAPTCHAs
Rachel Lathbury
Summer 2008
BACS 2010
University of Pennsylvania (Linguistics)
Meghan Knoll
Summer 2007
spyware
Carly Simpson
Summer 2007
security applications of GPUs
Salvatore Guarnieri
2003 – 2006
University of Washington (Masters 2010)
now at Google (New York)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Finalist in 2006
Michael Peck
2003 – 2004
Johns Hopkins University MS
David Friedman
2002
Johns Hopkins University
Adam Trost
2001 – 2002
UVA Law School
Ryan Persaud
2001
UC San Diego
researchgroup
Security Research Group (19 January 2016)
Jack Doerner, Samee Zahur, Mahnush Movahedi, Mohammad Etemad, Hannah Li, Weilin Xu, Karen Pan

Director


David Evans
Since Fall 1999