Wenhao Wang

Biography

Dr. Wenhao Wang is an associate professor at Institute of Information Engineering (IIE), CAS. His research interests now focus on protecting user privacy data with the help of hardware features, such as Intel SGX, as well as cryptographic techniques (e.g., homomorphic encryption). Dr. Wenhao Wang was a visiting scholar of Prof. XiaoFeng Wang’s group in Indiana University Bloomington from April 2016 to August 2018, during which he worked closely with Prof. Wang and Prof. Haixu Tang in organizing the Genomic data privacy and security protection competition. Please find the cv here: in English, 中文.

Please send an email to wangwenhao@iie.ac.cn if you would like to join the group. Students with interests in topics related to operating system, virtualization, hardware-assisted security, TEE, privacy preserving technologies and microarchitectural side channels etc., are all welcome.

Due to the institute’s policy, I am currently unable to accept international students.

News

• [Oct. 2025] One paper on side-channel attacks has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). The paper reveals novel timing side channels in LLM inference arising from shared KV and semantic caches, demonstrates practical attacks that recover private and system prompts through timing-based inference, and highlights the urgent need for mitigation against such privacy threats in multi-user LLM deployments. Following our findings, several LLM API providers (including OpenAI, Azure, and Fireworks) have implemented mitigations for these timing vulnerabilities, such as disabling global cache sharing across organizations and updating their documentation.

• [Aug. 2025] Two papers on efficient and privacy-preserving neural network inference have been accepted for presentation at S&P 2025 and NDSS 2026. The first paper leverages sparsity in Transformers to reduce computational costs, while the second introduces performance-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) adapters specifically designed for private inference.

• [Aug. 2025] One paper on side channel attacks has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). The paper demonstrates that the leakage in Dilithium’s NTT-based polynomial multiplication can be effectively exploited in template attacks, and proposes a multivariate template attack to significantly improve key-recovery efficiency in both simulated and real-world settings.

Selected Publications (Full list: Google Scholar)

* Corresponding authors, [ ] Equal Contributions, Advised by me

Manuscripts

Courses

• Paper Readings (2019-Spring, 20 hours)
• Security Chips (2021-FALL, 2022-FALL, 40 hours)
• Chip and Processor Security (2023-FALL, 40 hours, with Prof. Mingzhe Zhang)
• Paper Readings (2024-Spring, 30 hours, with Prof. Ben Niu). Here are some tips for paper reading and writing
• Chip and Processor Security (2024-FALL, 2025-FALL, 40 hours)

Professional Services

• Reviewer for journals IEEE TDSC, IEEE Security & Privacy, IEEE TC, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, CyberSecurity, SCN, JNCA.
• Sub-reviewer for CCS (2018, 2020), NDSS (2017, 2018, 2021), S&P (2017, 2020, 2021), Usenix Security (2017, 2018, 2021), HPCA (2019), ESORICS (2018, 2020), Asiacrypt (2020), AsiaCCS (2017, 2018, 2019) and RECOMB (2019) etc.
• TPC member for ACM CCS 2019, GenoPri 2020, SECURWARE 2022, ACNS 2023.
• General Chair for Inscrypt 2022.

Awards

• 2018 ACM SIGSAC China Rising Star Award, and ACM China Rising Star Nomination Award
• 2017 Young Star Award of Institute of Information Engineering, CAS

Students

• Master students:
  • Yifan Bai
  • Xinhong Liu
  • Saisai Xia
• PhD students:
  • Linke Song (Co-advised with Prof. Wei Song)

Alumni

• Zhennan Min
• Huihao Zhang
• Jinze She
• Wei He (in pursuit of a Doctoral Degree with Prof. Wei Song)
• Wenwen Ruan (First job: Intel)
• Sitong Chen (First job: Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology)
• Bohan Li (Co-advised with Prof. Dongdai Lin)
• Zihao Wang (Co-advised with Prof. XiaoFeng Wang)
• Zhaoyang Geng
• Benshan Mei (Co-advised with Prof. Dongdai Lin)
• Haopeng Fan (visiting student from Henan Key Laboratory of Network Cryptography Technology)

Useful Links

• Top Cyber Security Conferences Ranking
• IACR Calendar of Events in Cryptology
• Influential Security Papers and Influential Crypto Papers
• UCL Crypto Group - Forthcoming calls for papers
• System Security Circus
• Security and Privacy Conference Deadlines

Last updated: Oct. 2025.

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