About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cybersecurity at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Before joining RIT, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 2021, supervised by Dr. Rui Zhang. I received my B.E. and M.E. degrees, both in Computer Science, from Hangzhou Dianzi University, China.

My research is on cybersecurity and data privacy, with a current focus on local differential privacy, privacy-preserving AI, and trustworthy agentic AI. Earlier work covers privacy in mobile sensing and crowdsourcing, integrity of outsourced computation, and the security of wireless sensing and localization. My work has appeared at ICNP, INFOCOM, TDSC, TON, and PETs.

I am a recipient of the NSF CRII Award (2023) and a Meta Research Award (2022), and our papers have received the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at PETs (2026), an Artifact Award Runner-up at PETs (2025), the Best Paper Award at IEEE CNS (2023), and a Best Paper Runner-up Award at IWQoS (2019).

I am looking for highly self-motivated Ph.D. students to work on data privacy, privacy-preserving machine learning, and data protection in networked and distributed systems. If you are interested, please email me.

News

  • [2026]Our paper has been accepted by IROS 2026. Congratulations to Xinyi!
  • [2026]Our paper PriVAR: Client-Side Privacy Framework for Real-Time Location-Based Augmented Reality has been accepted by IEEE ICDCS 2026. Congratulations to Shafizur!
  • [4/2026]Our work on AudAgent was covered by RIT News: New privacy tool helps detect when AI agents become double agents. Congratulations to Ye!
  • [2026]Our paper Quantifying Classifier Utility under Local Differential Privacy received the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at PETs 2026. Congratulations to Ye!
  • [2026]Glad to be serving on the program committees for IEEE S&P 2027, PETs 2027, IEEE INFOCOM 2027, ICML 2026, and NeurIPS 2026.
  • [2026]Glad to be serving as the Poster Chair for IEEE CNS 2026.
  • [2026]Four papers have been accepted by the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs) 2026 — on trajectory collection, classifier utility, correlated multi-attribute frequency estimation, and auditing privacy policy compliance in AI agents. Congratulations to Ye and Shafizur!
  • [2025]Our paper on optimal piecewise-based mechanisms for collecting bounded numerical data under local differential privacy was accepted by PETs 2025, and won the Artifact Award Runner-up. Congratulations to Ye!
  • [2025]Our paper on locally differentially private frequency estimation via joint randomized response was accepted by PETs 2025. Congratulations to Ye!
  • [2025]Glad to be serving as a Technical Program Committee member for IEEE INFOCOM 2026 and PETs 2026.

Honors and awards

  • Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award, PETs (with Ye Zheng) · 2026
  • Artifact Award Runner-up, PETs · 2025
  • NSF CRII Award, National Science Foundation · 2023
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE CNS · 2023
  • Meta Research Award, Meta · 2022
  • Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Award, University of Delaware · 2020
  • Student Conference Award, IEEE INFOCOM · 2020
  • Professional Development Award, University of Delaware · 2019
  • Outstanding Graduate Student Award, University of Delaware · 2019
  • Student Travel Grant, IEEE INFOCOM · 2019
  • Student Travel Grant, IEEE ICNP · 2017
  • Best-in-Session Presentation Award, IEEE INFOCOM · 2016

Publications Google Scholar

Conference papers

2026

Quantifying Classifier Utility under Local Differential Privacy Ye Zheng and Yidan Hu Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), 2026. Best Student Paper Award
TraCS: Trajectory Collection in Continuous Space under Local Differential Privacy Ye Zheng and Yidan Hu Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), 2026.
Frequency Estimation of Correlated Multi-attribute Data under Local Differential Privacy Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Ye Zheng, and Yidan Hu Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), 2026.
AudAgent: Automated Auditing of Privacy Policy Compliance in AI Agents Ye Zheng, Yimin Chen, and Yidan Hu Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), 2026. [PDF]
PriVAR: Client-Side Privacy Framework for Real-Time Location-Based Augmented Reality Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Ye Zheng, Zhengxiong Li, and Yidan Hu 46th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Seoul, Korea, 2026. [PDF]
EarlyShield: Early-Stage Screening for Robust Personalized Federated Learning Shixiong Li, Xingyu Lyu, Ning Wang, Tao Li, Danjue Chen, Yidan Hu, and Yimin Chen Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), Hong Kong, China, June 2026. [PDF]
Two Heads Are Better Than One: Model-Weight and Latent-Space Analysis for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Against Model Poisoning Attacks Xingyu Lyu, Ning Wang, Shixiong Li, Yidan Hu, and Yimin Chen Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), Hong Kong, China, June 2026. [PDF]

2025

PlasTrack: Path-Independent Plasma-Induced Attacks on mmWave Sensing Tracking Zheshuo Li, Lingfeng Tao, Yidan Hu, and Zhengxiong Li IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), Avignon, France, September 2025.
Byzantine-robust Federated Learning Zheyuan Liu, Qian Guo, Yidan Hu, Aisha Aseeri, Depeng Li, and Rui Zhang IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Tokyo, Japan, August 2025.
Optimal Piecewise-based Mechanism for Collecting Bounded Numerical Data under Local Differential Privacy Ye Zheng, Sumita Mishra, and Yidan Hu Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), Washington DC and online, July 2025. Artifact Award Runner-up
Locally Differentially Private Frequency Estimation via Joint Randomized Response Ye Zheng, Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Yidan Hu, Rui Zhang, and Yanchao Zhang Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), Washington DC and online, July 2025.

2024

A Black-Box Approach for Quantifying Leakage of Trace-Based Correlated Data Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Zhengxiong Li, and Yidan Hu 7th International Workshop on Physics Embedded AI Solutions in Mobile Computing (MobiCom Picasso Workshop), Washington DC, November 2024.
Multi-sensor Data Privacy Protection with Adaptive Privacy Budget for IoT Systems Xinyi Liu, Ye Zheng, Zhengxiong Li, and Yidan Hu IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2024.

2023

Authenticating Outsourced Location-Based Skyline Queries under Shortest Path Distance Yidan Hu, Yukun Dong, Wenxin Chen, Yingfei Dong, and Rui Zhang IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), Orlando, FL, October 2023. Best Paper Award
Location Inference under Temporal Correlation Yukun Dong, Yidan Hu, Aisha Aseeri, Depeng Li, and Rui Zhang IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Honolulu, HI, July 2023.
Sybil Detection in Connected Vehicle Systems via Angle-of-Arrival Estimation Tianye Ma, Yidan Hu, Aisha Aseeri, Yukun Dong, and Rui Zhang IEEE International Conference on Mobility, Operations, Services and Technologies (MOST), Detroit, MI, May 2023.

2022

Continuous Indoor Tracking via Differential RSS Fingerprinting Yunzhi Li, Yidan Hu, Aisha Aseeri, Mark Nejad, and Rui Zhang IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS), Denver, CO, October 2022.
ImPos: An Image-Based Indoor Positioning System Yunzhi Li, Rajeswari Kambhamettu, Yidan Hu, and Rui Zhang IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), virtual, January 2022.

2021

Secure Outsourced Top-k Selection Queries against Untrusted Cloud Service Providers Xixun Yu, Yidan Hu, Rui Zhang, Zheng Yan, and Yanchao Zhang 29th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), virtual, June 2021.

2020

KV-Fresh: Freshness Authentication for Outsourced Multi-Version Key-Value Stores Yidan Hu and Rui Zhang 39th Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), virtual, July 2020. Acceptance rate 268/1354 = 19.8%.

2019

Differentially-Private Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction Yidan Hu and Rui Zhang 38th Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Paris, France, April–May 2019. Acceptance rate 288/1464 = 19.7%.
Secure Indoor Positioning against Signal Strength Attacks via Optimized Multi-Voting Yunzhi Li, Yidan Hu, Rui Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, and Terri Hedgpeth IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), Phoenix, AZ, June 2019. Best Paper Runner-up

2018

Secure RSS-Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning: Attacks and Countermeasures Lizhou Yuan, Yidan Hu, Rui Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, and Terri Hedgpeth IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), Beijing, China, May–June 2018.

2017

Secure Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction Yidan Hu and Rui Zhang IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Toronto, Canada, October 2017. Acceptance rate 18.66%.

2016

BlueAer: A Fine-Grained Urban PM2.5 3D Monitoring System Using Mobile Sensing Yidan Hu, Guojun Dai, Jin Fan, Yifan Wu, and Hua Zhang 35th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), San Francisco, CA, April 2016. Acceptance rate 300/1644 = 18.25%.

Journal articles

2024

“I Can See Your Password”: A Case Study about Cybersecurity Risks in Mid-Air Interactions of Mixed Reality-Based Smart Manufacturing Applications Wenhao Yang, Xiwen Dengxiong, Xueting Wang, Yidan Hu, and Yunbo Zhang Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 2024.

2022

Freshness Authentication for Outsourced Multi-Version Key-Value Stores Yidan Hu, Xin Yao, Rui Zhang, and Yanchao Zhang IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2022.

2020

A Spatiotemporal Approach for Secure Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction Yidan Hu and Rui Zhang IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 1790–1803, August 2020.

2017

DisLoc: A Convex Partitioning Based Approach for Distributed 3D Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks Jin Fan, Yidan Hu, Tom H. Luan, and Mianxiong Dong IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 17, no. 24, pp. 8412–8423, December 2017.

2016

An Estimated Method of Urban Concentration Distribution for a Mobile Sensing System Yidan Hu, Jin Fan, Hua Zhang, Xinxin Chen, and Guojun Dai Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 25, pp. 88–103, January 2016.
A Mobile Sensing System for Urban PM2.5 Monitoring with Adaptive Resolution Hongjie Guo, Guojun Dai, Jin Fan, Yifan Wu, Fangyao Shen, and Yidan Hu Journal of Sensors, vol. 2016, pp. 1–14, 2016.
Arm Motion Recognition and Exercise Coaching System for Remote Interaction Hong Zeng, Yidan Hu, Jin Fan, Haiyang Hu, Zhigang Gao, and Qiming Fang Mobile Information Systems, vol. 2016, 2016.

Teaching

  • CSEC-721 · 3 credits Advanced Data Privacy
  • CSEC-472 · 3 credits Authentication and Security Models

    The theory, design, and implementation of the systems behind identification, authentication, authorization, and accountability, with a focus on trust at each layer. Students examine formal models of access control, approaches to system accreditation, the application of cryptography to authentication, and how IAAA principles are implemented in modern operating systems.

  • CSEC-759 · 3 credits Special Topics in Computing Security

    A rotating course on current topics in computing security, with the focal area set each time it is offered.

Students

I am looking for highly self-motivated Ph.D. students to work on data privacy, privacy-preserving machine learning, and data protection in networked and distributed systems. If you are interested, please email me.

Ph.D. students

Master’s students

  • James Southcott

Professional service

Technical program committee

  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2027
  • IEEE INFOCOM, 2023–2027
  • Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), 2026–2027
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
  • Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026
  • IEEE CNS, 2022–2024
  • IEEE ICCCN, 2023–2024
  • ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2022–2023
  • IEEE INFOCOM Demo, 2022
  • IEEE MASS, 2022

Journal reviewer

  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
  • IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
  • IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
  • IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking
  • Wireless Networks (WINET)

Organizing committee

  • Poster Chair, IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), 2026
  • Student Travel Grant Chair, IEEE CNS, 2025
  • Publication Chair, IEEE CNS, 2024
  • Graduate Steering Committee, Women in Engineering, University of Delaware