Short Intro

Hi! My name is Shufan Zhang. I am currently a first-year PhD student in Computer Science at University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Canada), working on database security & privacy supervised by Prof. Xi He, as part of the Data System Group (DSG). I am looking for research internships in 2023.

My research interests mainly lie in the field of computer security & data privacy, as well as its intersections with database systems and machine learning. I am excited to apply formal security and privacy analysis and develop solutions that are both theoretically sound and practically feasible. I have previously worked on machine learning robustness, access control privacy, location privacy, differentially private data synthesis, secure protocols (e.g. data sharing and e-voting), with a recent focus on the security&privacy problems in database systems. I am so fortunate to work with many nice professors and talented colleagues. Our research results have appeared on conferences ITCS, VLDB, IEEE ICDCS, TPDP, and journals IEEE TVT, and Int. J. Inf. Secur.

Publications

  • Recovery from Non-Decomposable Distance Oracles. [paper] [arXiv] [Tweetorial] [bibtex] [slides] [video]
    Zhuangfei Hu, Xinda Li, David P. Woodruff, Hongyang Zhang, Shufan Zhang. (α-β order)
    The 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2023).
  • DProvSQL: Privacy Provenance Framework for Differentially Private SQL Engine [paper] [bibtex] [video]
    Shufan Zhang, Runchao Jiang, Xi He.
    The ICML 2022 Workshop on Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP 2022).
  • Don’t be a Tattle-Tale: Preventing Leakages through Data Dependencies on Access Control Protected Data. [paper] [bibtex] [slides] [poster] [codebase] [arXiv]
    Primal Pappachan, Shufan Zhang, Xi He, Sharad Mehrotra.
    International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2022).
  • Thwarting Longitudinal Location Exposure Attacks in Advertising Ecosystem via Edge Computing. [paper] [bibtex] [codebase] [slides]
    Le Yu†, Shufan Zhang†, Lu Zhou, Yan Meng, Suguo Du, Haojin Zhu. (†equal contribution)
    IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2022, acceptance rate=19.9%).
  • A Secure Flexible and Tampering-Resistant Data Sharing System for Vehicular Social Networks. [link] [bibtex]
    Jianfei Sun, Hu Xiong, Shufan Zhang, Ximeng Liu, Jiaming Yuan, Robert H. Deng
    IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, (2020).
  • Chaintegrity: Blockchain Enabled Large Scale E-voting System with Robustness and Universal Verifiability. [link] [bibtex]
    Shufan Zhang, Lili Wang, Hu Xiong
    International Journal of Information Security (2019).

Technical Reports

  • TaxiTrip-Synthesizer: Team GooseDP Solution to Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge (DeID2, 2021). [technical report] [codebase]
    Christian Covington, Karl Knopf, Shubhankar Mohapatra, Shufan Zhang.

Thesis

Teaching Experiences

  • Teaching Assistant:
    • Winter 2023: CS 458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy, University of Waterloo.
    • Fall 2022: CS 458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy, University of Waterloo.
    • Spring 2022: CS 458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy, University of Waterloo.
    • Winter 2022: CS 458/658 - Computer Security and Privacy, University of Waterloo.
    • Fall 2021: CS 115 - Introduction to Computer Science, University of Waterloo.
    • Spring 2021: CS 338 - Computer Applications in Business: Databases, University of Waterloo.

Activities and Services

  • Data System Group (DSG) Lab Committee Member, University of Waterloo (2022-present).
  • Subreviewer for Conferences:
    • ICALP 2022; PODS 2021, 2022; SIGMOD 2021, 2023; VLDB 2021, 2022; CCS 2021; USENIX Security 2022; ICDE 2021; FAccT 2022; PoPETS 2022; INFOCOM 2020; EDBT 2020; CollaborateCom 2020.
  • Reviewer for Journals:
    • IEEE Trans. on Industrial Informatics
    • IEEE Trans. on Intelligent Transportation Systems
    • IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
    • Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies
    • Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
    • Computers and Electrical Engineering
    • Security and Communication Networks

Awards

  • International Doctoral Student Award (2022, 2023)
  • University of Waterloo Doctoral Entrance Scholarship (2022)
  • VLDB Travel Award (2022)
  • NIST Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge, Sprint 3 (5th Prize, GooseDP Team, 2021)
  • International Master's Award of Excellence (2020, 2021, 2022)
  • University of Waterloo Entrance Scholarship (2020)

Misc.

If you want to know me, feel free to drop an e-mail on me. Minds are like parachutes — they only function when open. We may have fun talks and generate sparks of ideas. Discussions and recommendations of interesting books, movies, and researches are always welcome.

[FYI: My GnuPG public key has Key-ID 65009EAE343F5D9F with fingerprint 0BFE E026 DA8C 4EA9 2413 5302 6500 9EAE 343F 5D9F (full key).]

Quick Links to some useful/interesting websites: Conference Track, Academic Lineage, Author Distances, Security Conference Statistics, Acronymify, Security & Cryptography Conference Calendar, TikZ for Crypto, CCF Rec List (a reference list for publication venues, in Chinese), IACR Event Calendar, WiKi: Displaying_a_formula, LaTeX_Symbols. (To Be Appended~)


This page is still under construction.

Design Copyright © Shufan Zhang, 2019 - 2023
Last Modified: Feb. 1st, 2023