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About Me

Here is Nan Yan (闫楠).

I am a second-year graduate student in the Department of Cyber Science and Engineering at the Wuhan University (WHU), advised by Prof. Yuqing Li, within Data Security Lab. I also work closely with Prof. Jing Chen and Prof. Xiong Wang. Before that, I received my B.Eng. degree in School of Cyber Science and Engineering from Shandong University (SDU) in 2023.

My research interests lie in Trustworthy AI, with a particular focus on studying the security, safety, and privacy of machine learning systems. I work on developing innovative solutions for privacy-preserving federated learning, and I am especially interested in emerging challenges in the security of large language models (LLMs) and AI agents.

Outside the digital realm, I channel my energy into 🏊swimming and 💪fitness.

If you are interested in any aspect of me, I am always open to discussions and collaborations. Feel free to reach out to me at 📬nanyan [at] whu [dot] edu [dot] cn

📌I am actively seeking a PhD position for 2026 Fall admission. If you have any information, please contact me. Thank you!

Research Interests

  • Security of generative AI and LLM agents: Exploring the security of large language models (LLMs), including backdoor attacks, jailbreak techniques, and emerging threats in LLM-powered agents.
  • Privacy: Investigating the use of Differential Privacy (DP) in the fine-tuning of LLMs to enhance privacy guarantees.
  • Federated Learning: Enhancing the efficiency and robustness of federated learning systems, with a focus on privacy-preserving techniques such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and DP.

News

Publications

  • EmbedX: Embedding-Based Cross-Trigger Backdoor Attack Against Large Language Models

    Nan Yan, Yuqing Li, Xiong Wang, Jing Chen, Kun He, Bo Li, in Proc. USENIX Security, 2025 [media]

  • FedPHE: A Secure and Efficient Federated Learning via Packed Homomorphic Encryption

    Yuqing Li, Nan Yan, Jing Chen, Xiong Wang, Jianan Hong, Kun He, Wei Wang, Bo Li, in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2025, [html] [code] [media] (The first author is the advisor)

  • Efficient and Straggler-Resistant Homomorphic Encryption for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

    Nan Yan, Yuqing Li, Jing Chen, Xiong Wang, Jiannan Hong, Kun He, and Wei Wang, in IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2024. [pdf] [code] [slides] [html] [media]

Experience

  • Research Intern, Rice University, working with Prof. Jiarong Xing, 2025

    Project: Agent security

  • Research Intern, Pennsylvania State University, working with Prof. Peng Liu, 2025

    Project: Static code analysis of agent memory

Scholarships and Honors

  • National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education, China (2024)
  • Metrit Student, WHU (2024)
  • First Class Scholarship (Award Rate: 5% school-wide), WHU (2024)
  • Cybersecurity Academy Student Innovation Grant Program (2023)
  • Outstanding Graduate Award, SDU (2023)
  • Alumni Council Representative (Dept. CSE, 6/101), SDU (2023)
  • The Power of Role Models Academy Person of the Year (Dept. CSE, Top 1), SDU (2023)
  • Excellent Student Cadre, SDU (2022)
  • Second Class Scholarship (Award Rate: 10% school-wide), SDU (2020, 2022)
  • Merit-Based Scholarship, SDU (2020, 2022×3)

Competition Awards

  • Second Prize of The 7-th National College Cryptography Mathematics Contest, Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research, China (2022)
  • Second Prize of The 15-th National College Student Information Security Competition, Cyber Security Association, China (2022)
  • First Prize of The 7-th National College Cryptography Mathematics Contest, Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research, North China Division (2022)
  • First Prize of China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling, Shandong Province (2021)

Patents and Software Copyrights

  • “Large language model training method and system based on elastic federated low-rank

    adaptive fine-tuning”, China Patent Application CN119443311A, PatentPending (Feb 2025)

  • “Method for constructing a vertical federated learning system based on participant selection and parameter freezing”, China Patent Application CN202411465068.7, PatentPending (Jan 2025)

  • “Differential privacy-based heterogeneous federal fine tuning language model construction method and system”, China Patent Application CN119150357A, PatentPending (Dec 2024)

  • “Cross-silo heterogeneous federated learning system based on homomorphic encryption V1.0”, China Software Copyrights 2024SR1516588 (Oct 2024)

  • “Method and device for constructing cross-silo heterogeneous federated learning system based on homomorphic encryption”, China Patent Application CN117892322A, PatentPending (Apr 2024)

  • “Network traffic obfuscation method, device, equipment and medium”, China Patent Application CN117749402A, PatentPending (Mar 2024)