Yan Long (龙颜)

Yan Long (龙颜)

Incoming Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

Sensing With Better Security and Privacy

My research is broadly in cyber-physical system (CPS) security and privacy and spans the intersections of embedded systems, sensing, and mobile computing. I seek to ensure trustworthy and confidential sensing-based computation in user-device interactions, critical infrastructures, and emerging technologies, with a focus on the hardware-software interfaces. I received my PhD degree from the University of Michigan, EECS. I am currently working with my PhD advisor Prof. Kevin Fu (Fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAS) at the Security And Privacy Research Group (SPQR). I completed my B.E. degree in Electronic and Information Engineering at Zhejiang University under the supervision of Prof. Wenyuan Xu and Prof. Xiaoyu Ji.

[Call For Papers] Prof. Wayne Burleson and I are editing a Special Issue, Sensors in Hardware Security, with the Sensors journal. The special issue seeks to highlight solid research on how to use sensors for hardware security and how to protect sensing. Please check out the special issue website and consider submitting your work before May 2025!

[Recruiting PhD Students and Interns] I am joining the Computer Science Department of the University of Virginia as an assistant professor starting August 2025, and have multiple PhD openings in the application season of fall 2024. I especially encourage students with an interdisciplinary background (e.g., EE, ME, etc.) and students from historically underrepresented groups to apply. Note that UVA requires no PhD applicaiton fee this year! If you are interested in working with me as PhD students or undergrad/grad interns, please feel free to contact me with your resume:
email [yanlong AT umich.edu] and cc [yan.long AT virginia.edu]

Research Interests

News

  • [November, 2024] 🔬 I am guest editing the Sensors in Hardware Security Special Issue with the Sensors Journal. The submission deadline is May 2025.
  • [Oct 25, 2024] 🔬 I will be serving on program committee of New England Hardware Security Day (NEHWS) 2025, which will be held at MIT this year. Consider submitting your previous publications and give a talk!
  • [Oct 18, 2024] 🔬 I will be serving on program committee of ACM CCS 2025, dedicated to the Hardware, Side Channels, and Cyber-Physical Systems Track.
  • [Oct 18, 2024] 🔬 I will be serving on program committee of MobiSys 2025.
  • [Oct 10, 2024] 🏆 Our research EM Eye, NDSS’24 which discovers how attackers can eavesdrop on confidential videos of IoT cameras was selected as a finalist in the CSAW Applied Research Competition (top 8% of all submisisons). Let’s meet in NYC!
  • [Sep 1, 2024] We are organizing the Northeastern Security Seminar. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in giving a research talk in Boston.
  • [Aug 1, 2024] I am joining Northeastern University in Boston as a one-year postdoc researcher, continuing my work with Dr. Kevin Fu.
  • [May 20, 2024] 🏆 Our paper won the Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P (top 3% of accepted papers).
  • [May 8, 2024] 🏆 Excited to win the first place in the HOST 2024 PhD Dissertation Competition!
  • [April 8, 2024] 🏅 I am selected as a CPS Rising Star, Class of 2024.
  • [Feb, 2024] 🔬 I am starting to serve on the program committee of USENIX 2024.
  • [Feb 13-16, 2024] I will be in Singapore and give a talk at the National University of Singapore.
  • [Jan 25, 2024] Our threat modeling paper is appearing at VehicleSec 2024, demonstrating how acoustic interference induced by ablation and air ionization of high-power lasers could affect motion sensors, cameras, and computer vision algorithms of drones.
  • [Oct 11, 2023] I’m giving a joint seminar talk and research demo with Dr. Kevin Fu at University of Washington, Seattle.
  • [Oct 4, 2023] I’m giving a talk at MIT CSAIL.
  • [Sep 15, 2023] My paper EM Eye is accepted at NDSS’24 without revisions (35 papers accepted out of 483 submitted, top 7.2%). We demonstrate how attackers may visually spy on households by analyzing side-channel EM leakage of smart home cameras owned by the victim. Demos will be put up soon!
  • [Aug 15, 2023] 🔬 I am very excited to contribute to the First International Workshop on Security and Privacy of Sensing Systems (Sensors S&P 2023, co-located with SenSys) as a program committee member. Please see the CFP and consider joining us in Istanbul!
  • [July 19, 2023] 🔬 I will be serving on the technical program committee of the 19th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking (MSN 2023). The paper submission deadline is Aug 5. Please consider submitting your works here!
  • [June 22, 2023] Our paper on keyboard sensing security conditionally accepted at NDSS 2024.
  • [June 16, 2023] One co-first authored paper on Android sensor security conditionally accepted at RAID 2023.
  • [April 10, 2023] Our website for the Side Eye project is up. Check out the speech samples extracted from muted videos!
  • [Mar 27, 2023] Our position paper on satellite security threat modeling is invited to be presented at CySat 2023 in Paris.
  • [Mar 3, 2023] 🏅 I am honored to receive the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship!
  • [Feb 27, 2023] We presented our position paper on future sensor spoofing threats against satellites systems in the first Space Security Workshop.


Research Highlights