About
I am an AI Security Researcher at Ant Group and a joint postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University and Ant Group. I received my Ph.D. from the Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace at Tsinghua University in June 2025, advised by Professor Qi Li. During my Ph.D., I was also jointly advised by Professor Jianping Wu, Professor Ke Xu, and Professor Mingwei Xu.
My research focuses on the security and privacy of LLMs/Agents. I have published 20+ papers in leading security conferences and journals, including IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, NDSS, USENIX Security, IEEE TIFS, and IEEE/ACM ToN. I serve on the Program Committees of conferences including USENIX Security, WWW, AAAI, and EMNLP, and as a reviewer for journals including IEEE TIFS, IEEE TDSC, and IEEE/ACM ToN.
I have been fortunate to receive several awards and honors, including the First Prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award of Tsinghua University, and the 2026 World Intelligence Expo Frontier Science and Technology Achievement (Innovative Technology).
Recruitment & Collaboration. I am actively looking for research interns interested in LLM and agent security. I also welcome research collaborations on LLM security, agent security, and related topics.
Selected Publications
View All →* Equal contribution ✉ Corresponding author
[17]Silent Surrender: Measuring MitM-Induced TLS Downgrades in LLM Agents
Yifei Cheng, Xinhao Deng, Yujia Zhu, Baiyang Li, Yaochen Ren, Gang Xiong, Zhen Li, Jiang Xie, Xixun Lin, Qingyun Liu
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2027CCF-A
[16]Beyond Single-Tab: State-Aware Traffic Shaping for Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting Defense
Changhao Qiu, Tianyu Cui, Xinhao Deng, Bangbang Ren, Deke Guo
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2027CCF-A
[15]Towards Robust Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting
Xinhao Deng, Xiyuan Zhao, Qilei Yin, Zhuotao Liu, Qi Li, Mingwei Xu, Ke Xu, Jianping Wu
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) 2026CCF-A
[14]Towards Robust Detection of Malicious Encrypted Traffic Using Only Low-Quality Training Data
Yuqi Qing, Qilei Yin, Xinhao Deng, Yihao Chen, Zhuotao Liu, Kun Sun, Ke Xu, Jia Zhang, Qi Li
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) 2026CCF-A
[13]Robust LLM-Based Website Fingerprinting under Dynamic Real-World Conditions
Xiyuan Zhao, Xinhao Deng, Tianyu Cui, Yixiang Zhang, Ke Xu, Qi Li
ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2026CCF-A
[12]STAR: Semantic-Traffic Alignment and Retrieval for Zero-Shot HTTPS Website Fingerprinting
Yifei Cheng, Yujia Zhu, Baiyang Li, Xinhao Deng, Yitong Cai, Yaochen Ren, Qingyun Liu
IEEE INFOCOM 2026CCF-A
[11]From Length to Content: Token-Length Side-Channel Attacks on Merged LLM API Outputs
Sijia Li, Tianyu Cui, Miao Chen, Xinjie Lin, Zheyuan Gu, Xinhao Deng, Ke Xu, Qi Li
USENIX Security Symposium 2026CCF-A
[10]Towards Practical Few-shot Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting
Lin Liu, Ziling Wei, Zhuotao Liu, Xinhao Deng, Zixuan Dong, Shuhui Chen
USENIX Security Symposium 2026CCF-A
[9]Enhancing Website Fingerprinting Attacks against Traffic Drift
Xinhao Deng, Yixiang Zhang, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Yabo Wang, Ke Xu
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2026CCF-A
[8]Training Robust Classifiers for Classifying Encrypted Traffic under Dynamic Network Conditions
Yuqi Qing, Qilei Yin, Xinhao Deng, Xiaoli Zhang, Peiyang Li, Zhuotao Liu, Kun Sun, Ke Xu, Qi Li
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025CCF-A
[7]HOLMES & WATSON: A Robust and Lightweight HTTPS Website Fingerprinting through HTTP Version Parallelism
Yifei Cheng, Yujia Zhu, Baiyang Li, Peishuai Sun, Yong Ding, Xinhao Deng, Qingyun Liu
ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2025CCF-A
[6]Wedjat: Detecting Sophisticated Evasion Attacks via Real-time Causal Analysis
Li Gao, Chuanpu Fu, Xinhao Deng, Ke Xu, Qi Li
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2025CCF-A
[1]Dynamic Network Function Enforcement via Joint Flow and Function Scheduling
Qi Li, Xinhao Deng, Zhuotao Liu, Yuan Yang, Xiaoyue Zou, Mingwei Xu, Jianping Wu
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) 2022CCF-A