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Ph.D.

Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Cybersecurity and Privacy

Computer Science

• Advisor: Prof. Teodora Baluta

M.Sc.

Duke University, Pratt School of Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Advisor: Prof. Neil Zhenqiang Gong
• GPA: 4.0/4.0

B.S.

Duke Kunshan University

Data Science

• GPA: 3.8/4.0

A Critical Evaluation of Defenses against Prompt Injection Attacks

ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (ACM SACMAT)

Yuqi Jia, Zedian Shao, Yupei Liu, Jinyuan Jia, Dawn Song, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

PromptLocate: Localizing Prompt Injection Attacks

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)

Yuqi Jia, Yupei Liu, Zedian Shao, Jinyuan Jia, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

Leave My Images Alone: Preventing Multi-Modal Large Language Models from Analyzing Images via Visual Prompt Injection

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Zedian Shao* and Hongbin Liu*, with Yuepeng Hu and Neil Zhenqiang Gong. *Equal contribution. Code: https://github.com/Sadcardation/ImageProtector

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security)

Zedian Shao, Charles Fleming, and Teodora Baluta. Code: https://github.com/Sadcardation/cordyceps

WebInject: Prompt Injection Attack to Web Agents

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Xilong Wang, John Bloch, Zedian Shao, Yuepeng Hu, Shuyan Zhou, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

Enhancing Prompt Injection Attacks to LLMs via Poisoning Alignment

ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec)

Zedian Shao* and Hongbin Liu*, with Jaden Mu and Neil Zhenqiang Gong. *Equal contribution. Code: https://github.com/Sadcardation/PoisonedAlign

Teaching Assistant | CS 8803: Machine Learning Security

Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing

• Designed assignments on adversarial examples, backdoor and poisoning attacks, watermarking, and formal-methods topics for a graduate machine learning security course.
• Graded written and programming assignments, developed feedback rubrics, and held office hours to help students reason through attacks, defenses, and implementation details.

Teaching Assistant | DECISION 521Q: Decision Analytics and Modeling

Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business

• Evaluated analytics and modeling assignments, clarified optimization and decision-analysis concepts, and supported students through office hours.

Software Development Engineer

Lexikat Pte. Ltd.

• Built the core architecture of an iOS privacy-protection application in SwiftUI, integrating PhotosUI and UIKit for media selection, preview, and editing workflows.
• Implemented efficient image and video processing pipelines with PhotoKit and Image I/O to support privacy-preserving transformations on user media.
• Developed OpenCV-based text-image transformation features designed to reduce OCR readability while preserving human-readable content.

AI Security Research Knowledge Base Telegram Bot

Python, FastAPI, LangGraph, Qdrant, PostgreSQL

• Built a personal Telegram bot-based AI-security research assistant with an agent harness to coordinate tool execution, workflow state management, retrieval pipelines, and multi-step research reasoning.
• Designed a multi-agent workflow for topic classification, query expansion, source retrieval, grounded synthesis, and conversation summarization.
• Implemented a RAG knowledge-base pipeline for arXiv PDFs, conference papers, GitHub READMEs, and personal notes using semantic chunking, metadata filtering, hybrid search, and reranking.

Toy Rootkit: Stealth Kernel Module for Process Concealment

C, Linux Kernel Programming, System Call Hooking

• Built a Linux kernel module that intercepts system calls to support process hiding, module hiding, and file access redirection.
• Modified the sys_call_table to hook getdents64, openat, and read, concealing target processes and kernel modules from user-space utilities such as ls, ps, and cat /proc/modules.

Daemonized Multithreaded HTTP Caching Proxy

C++, Boost, Web Programming, Multithreading, Daemon

• Implemented a daemonized C++/Boost HTTP caching proxy that parses client requests, forwards upstream traffic, and stores reusable responses.
• Designed an LRU-based cache with HTTP revalidation logic to reuse cached resources while preserving response freshness.
• Added multithreaded request handling to serve concurrent client connections and isolate long-running network operations.

USENIX Security Student Grant and GREPSEC VII Travel Award

USENIX Security and GREPSEC VII

Dean's List with Distinction (top 10%)

Duke Kunshan University

Merit-based Scholarship

Duke Kunshan University

Second Prize, Chinese Chemistry Olympiad (CChO)

Chinese Chemistry Olympiad

Reviewer

NeurIPS

Academic service

Reviewer

ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Academic service

Invited Speaker

OpenSSF AI/ML Security Working Group

Covert Control Attacks on LLM