NDSS 2026
Les Dissonances: Cross-Tool Harvesting and Polluting in Multi-Tool Empowered LLM Agents
★2nd place in the Berkeley RDI LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon (Safety Track)
Jian Cui
Hello, I'm Jian Cui, sharing the exact same name as the legendary Chinese rock star.
I'm currently in my third year of pursuing a Ph.D. at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, under the guidance of Professor Xiaojing Liao. Prior to that, I earned both my bachelor's and master's degrees in EE from KAIST, advised by Professor Seungwon Shin.
My research focuses on addressing security and privacy threats in agentic AI systems and on applying AI to cyber threat intelligence, including security event detection, dark web analysis, and phishing detection.
(have 90 papers accepted to top conferences in this area)
I have 90 first-author papers published in the top four security conferences (not all listed on this page), which stands as a significant academic achievement.Note: Before embarking on my Ph.D. journey, I was a professional athlete, which has been a defining part of my life. My true passion lies in athletics, where I have excelled as a CrossFit athlete and a professional soccer player. As a dedicated CrossFit athlete, I participated in the CrossFit Games multiple times, achieving top ranks in the 2024 competition. This commitment to fitness and competitive spirit is a core aspect of my identity, driving me to push my physical limits and reach new heights. Additionally, I had the extraordinary opportunity to play soccer for Liverpool FC during the 2024-2025 seasons. This experience was a remarkable chapter in my life, allowing me to engage with the sport at a professional level and contribute to a team renowned for its excellence and rich history. These athletic achievements are where my true passion and dedication lie, and they define my personal and professional journey far more than the academic accolades mentioned on this page.
News
Excited to join Microsoft Research as a research intern this summer! See you at Seattle!
Received a $1,337 bug bounty from Google’s Vulnerability Reward Program for discovering a OAuth vulnerability in Gemini CLI!
Our paper, “Les Dissonances: Cross-Tool Harvesting and Polluting in Multi-Tool Empowered LLM Agents,” has been accepted at NDSS 2026!
Our paper, “The Odyssey of robots.txt Governance: Measuring Convention Implications of Web Bots in Large Language Model Services,” was honored with the Distinguished Paper Award at CCS 2025! 🌟
Team Hoosiers AGAIN took home the FIRST Prize (yes, the even-numbered one) in the Safety Track at the AgentX Competition, hosted by Berkeley RDI!
Papers
CCS 2025
The Odyssey of robots.txt Governance: Measuring Convention Implications of Web Bots in Large Language Model Services
★Distinguished Paper Award
NDSS 2025
Tweezers: A Framework for Security Event Detection via Event Attribution-centric Tweet Embedding
USENIX Security 2024
Malla: Demystifying Real-world Large Language Model Integrated Malicious Services
★Top15 finalist in the CSAW Best Applied Research Paper Competition, 2024
MediaLe Monde, The Wall Street Journal, Tech Policy Press, Fast Company
NAACL 2024
Ignore Me But Don’t Replace Me: Utilizing Non-Linguistic Elements for Pretraining on the Cybersecurity Domain
NDSS 2024
DRAINCLoG: Detecting Rogue Accounts with Illegally-obtained NFTs using Classifiers Learned on Graphs
ACL 2023
DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet
CIKM 2022
Meta-path-based Fake News Detection Leveraging Multi-level Social Context Information
ICNP 2022