Welcome!

The SAND Lab (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data) at University of Chicago is co-directed by Professor Ben Y. Zhao and Professor Heather Zheng. Our research spans topics in security and machine learning, with occasional ventures into HCI and data mining. Lab members includes (6-10) PhD, MS and undergraduate researchers, as well as some visiting scholars.

PhD Positions

In any normal year, we are looking to add 1-2 passionate and driven PhD students to the lab. We are looking to recruit 1-2 students in the 2025-2026 admission cycle. If you're interested, please fill out this little Google form so we can keep you on a short list of candidates, and make sure to mention Heather and Ben when checking boxes for faculty in your UChicago PhD Application.

Latest

Congrats to the other newly minted Professor, Prof. Shawn Shan! Shawn successfully defended his PhD dissertation, and will be joining Dartmouth College in 2026 as Assistant Professor of Computer Science! Congrats Shawn, what a ride it's been, all 8 years of it!

Congrats to newly minted Professor Zhuolin Yang! Zhuolin successfully defended her PhD dissertation today on AI-enhanced privacy attacks, and will be joining Univ. of Arizona in August as Assistant Professor of Computer Science! Congrats Zhuolin!!

Congrats to Stanley, Ronik and Anna for their CCS paper on Hemlock (adversarial mislabeling poison) attacks!

Congrats to Enze, Elisa and Shawn for their IMC paper measuring genAI crawlers and defenses!

Congrats to Anna, Josephine, Ronik and Shawn for receiving CCS Distinguished Paper Award for their Generative AI image detection paper!

Congrats to Shawn, for being named not only one of MIT Technology's 35 Young Innovators under 35, but also their Innovator of the year!!

Congrats to Ben for being named one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people in AI!

Congrats to Wenxin, Cathy, and Shawn for their diffusion model implosion paper, to appear at ACM CCS 2024!

Congrats to Anna, Josephine, Ronik, Shawn and Reid for their generative AI image detection paper, to appear at ACM CCS 2024!

Congrats to Shawn, Wenxin, Josephine, Stanley for the Nightshade paper, to appear at IEEE S&P 2024!

Congrats to Wenxin and Arjun on the model versioning paper to appear at SaTML 2024!

Wow, Congrats to Shawn, Jenna and Emily for being named to Forbes 30 under 30, 2024! What an honor!

Glaze wins the Chicago Innovation Award

Glaze wins special mention in TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2023

Congrats to Wenxin, Arjun and our Princeton collaborators on the NeurIPS spotlight paper!

Congrats to Cathy and Emily for their new Salsa papers at CCS (Picante) and NeurIPS (Verde)!

Congratulations to our new PhD grads, Huiying, Emily, Francesca, and Jenna!
It's the end of an era, and we will miss you all!

Congrats to Heather, now a Fellow of the ACM (ACM Press Release)

Congrats to Emily for her selection as a Siebel Scholar, class of 2023!

Congrats to Emily for her selection in EECS Rising Star 2022!

Current Research Areas

Research at the SAND lab encompasses topics across multiple areas, most heavily centered around three core areas: wireless and mobile systems, HCI and social behavior, security and privacy. Please see individual links below for more information on specific ongoing projects and related publications.

Adversarial Machine Learning

  • Projects
  • Adversarial Attacks against and using ML
  • Malicious Crowdsourcing and Defenses
 

Wireless and Mobile Systems

 

HCI and User Behavior

 

Recent Papers (2020-2024)

  • ACM CCS: Diffusion Model implosion
  • ACM CCS: GenAI image detection
    ** Distinguished Paper Award!
    ** MIT Innovator of the Year (Shawn)!
    ** MIT 35 Young Innovators under 35 (Shawn)!
  • IEEE SaTML: Robust model versioning
  • IEEE S&P: Nightshade attack
  • USENIX SEC: VR Keystroke Inference
  • PETS: Data Isotopes
  • USENIX SEC: Glaze
    ** Forbes 30 under 30 (Shawn / Jenna / Emily)!
    ** TIME Magazine Best Inventions!
    ** Chicago Innovation Award!
    ** USENIX Internet Defense Prize!
    ** Distinguished Paper Award!
  • USENIX SEC: General Keystroke Inference
  • PETS: Protection for Face Editing
  • Oakland: anti-facial recognition
  • NeurIPS: Representation similarity
  • NeurIPS: Natural backdoors
  • CCS: Whitebox attack recovery
  • USENIX SEC: Poison Forensics
  • USENIX SEC: Blackbox defense
  • CCS: Voice cloning attacks
  • IJCAI: Bias in Anomaly Detection
  • CVPR: Backdoor attacks in real world
  • CHI: EMS-based user authentication
  • CCS: Honeypots as defense for DNNs
  • USENIX Security: Fawkes Image Cloaking
  • CHI: Wearable Ultrasonic Microphone Jammers
    ** Best Paper Honorable Mention!
  • CHI: Gender Bias Detection
    ** Best Paper Honorable Mention!
  • NDSS: Adversarial Sensing Attacks
  • CCS: Latent Backdoor Attacks on DNNs
  • SIGCOMM: Automated ACL management
  • MobiHoc: ML for spectrum anomaly detection
  • Oakland/S&P: Backdoor Defense

Available Software Downloads
* Neural Cleanse: detecting and mitigating backdoors in DNNs
* Measurement-calibrated graph models
* Graph Coordinate Systems (Orion, Rigel, Leo)

News and Upcoming Deadlines

  • 11/2019: Lab receives DARPA GARD grant on adversarial attacks
  • 8/2019: Lab receives NSF grant on Spectrum anomaly detection
  • 7/2019: Yanzi completes his PhD and moves to Google!
  • 7/2019: Ben interviewed by CNBC and speaks at AI/Work summit
  • 6/2019: Xinyi, Zhijing and Shiliang defend their PhDs and move to Facebook!
  • 6/2019: Ben speaks about weaponized AI to Chicago Bar Association
  • 5/2019: Articles in UChicago Magazine and UChicago news about our research
  • 4/2019: Congrats to lab alum Gang, who moves to UIUC CS as Assistant Professor!
  • 2/2019: Congrats to lab alum Christo, who wins Sloan Fellowship!
  • 12/2018: Bolun completes his PhD and moves to Facebook!