Ning Luo 罗宁

Starting August 2024, I will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research combines formal methods, automated reasoning, programming language, and cryptography to achieve security, verifiability, and confidentiality in practical and challenging scenarios.

I am looking for motivated and energetic Ph.D. students. Candidates are expected to have a solid background in Computer Science. No prior experience in cryptography or formal methods is required. However, candidates must be brave and eager to learn new things. The highest standard is required for research integrity. Please send me an email if you are interested in working with me.

I dedicate 30 minutes every week to provide guidance or suggestions for first-generation college or underrepresented students. If you need help or wish to discuss topics such as life, career paths, graduate school applications, or research ideas on cryptography, formal methods, privacy, and security, please fill out the form to arrange a meeting.

• FMitF: Automating and Synthesizing Parallel Zero-Knowledge Protocols.
  NSF CCF-2318974/ CCF-2318975
  Proposal development lead, with Xiao Wang, Ruzica Piskac, and Timos Antonopoulos.
  $ 750,000. Oct. 2023 - Sep. 2027

• ZKSMT: A VM for Proving SMT Theorems in Zero Knowledge
  Daniel Luick, John Kolesar, Timos Antonopoulos, William R. Harris, James Parker, Ruzica Piskac, Eran Tromer, Xiao Wang, Ning Luo.
  USENIX Security 2024
  PDF
• Privacy-Preserving Regular Expression Matching using Nondeterministic Finite Automata
  Ning Luo^*, Chenkai Weng^*, Jaspal Singh, Gefei Tan, Ruzica Piskac, Mariana Raykova
  ESORICS 2024
  PDF
• Ou: Automating the Parallelization of Zero-Knowledge Protocols
  Yuyang Sang^*, Ning Luo^*, Samuel Judson, Ben Chaimberg, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, Xiao Wang, Zhong Shao
  CCS 2023
  PDF
• Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge
  Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, William Harris, Ruzica Piskac, Eran Tromer, Xiao Wang
  CCS 2022 (Distinguished paper award)
  PDF
• ppSAT: Towards Two-Party Private SAT Solving
  Ning Luo, Samuel Judson, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, Xiao Wang
  USENIX Security 2022
  PDF
• Looking for the Maximum Independent Set: A New Perspective on the Stable Path Problem
  Yichao Cheng, Ning Luo, Jingxuan Zhang, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, Qiao Xiang
  INFOCOM 2021
  PDF
• Privacy Preserving CTL Model Checking through Oblivious Graph Algorithms
  Samuel Judson, Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac
  WPES 2020
  PDF

• Yale Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award, 2023
EECS Rising Stars , 2023
• Yale Roberts Innovation Award , 2023
• Distinguished Paper Award, ACM CCS , 2022
• USENIX Security Student Grant , 2022
• VMCAI Student Fellowship, 2022
• CAV Student Fellowship, 2019

• Oct. 2023, Incorporating Privacy-preserving Constraints into Automated Reasoning
  Northeastern Formal Methods Meetup, Yale University
• Oct. 2023, Proving SMT Theorems in Zero Knowledge
  DARPA SIEVE PI Meeting
• Apr. 2023, Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge
  Invited talk at Satisfiability: Theory, Practice, and Beyond Workshop, Simons Institute, University of California, Berkeley
• Apr. 2023, Automating the Parallelization of Zero-Knowledge Protocols
  DARPA SIEVE PI Meeting
• Nov. 2022, Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge.
  ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
• Aug. 2022, ppSAT: Towards Two-Party Privacy-Preserving SAT Solving
  USENIX Security Symposium
• Jan. 2022, Privacy-Preserving Formal Methods: Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge
  Invited talk at New York University
Dec. 2019, Privacy-Preserving Model Checking
Invited talk at Microsoft

• Fall 2023 - now, Haotian Chu, Gefei Tan (Ph.D students at Northwestern University)
• Fall 2023, John C. Kolesar, Daniel Luick (Ph.D students at Yale University)
  Publication: ZKSMT: A VM for Proving SMT Theorems in Zero Knowledge (USENIX Security 2024)
• Fall 2022, Qiuyue Qin, Huisan Xu (Masters at Xiamen University)
  Publication: Toward Privacy-Preserving Interdomain Configuration Verification via Multi-Party Computation (APNET 2023)
• 2019-2021, Yichao Cheng (Undergraduate at Yale University)
  Publication: Looking for the Maximum Independent Set: A New Perspective on the Stable Path Problem (INFOCOM 2021)
  Thesis (served as de facto advsor): Methods for Privacy-Preserving Model Checking in LTL
• Summer 2020, Michael Chen (Undergraduate at Yale University)

• Fall 2022, Teaching Fellow, Law, Security, and Logic (Yale University)
• Spring 2022, Teaching Fellow, Software Engineering (Yale University)
• Fall 2021, Teaching Fellow, Computer System Security (Yale University)
• Spring 2021, Teaching Fellow, Software Engineering (Yale University)
• Fall 2020, Teaching Fellow, Cryptography and Computer Security (Yale University)
• Spring 2020, Teaching Fellow, Artificial Intelligence (Yale University)
• Fall 2019, Teaching Fellow, Algorithm via Continuous Optimization (Yale University)

• Program Committee: CAV 2024, CSF 2024, PoPETS 2024, Euro S&P 2024
• External Reviewer: CAV 2023, IEEE S&P 2023
  
• Artifact Evaluation Committee: USENIX Security 2023
• Session Chair : POPL 2022 TutorialFest