Ning Luo

For More Information

• Ning Luo Website

Education

• BS in Mathematics, Shandong University, 2017
• Ph.D, Computer Science, Yale University, 2022

Biography

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, advised by Ruzica Piskac. Prior to joining UIUC, I spent a wonderful year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Northwestern University, hosted by Xiao Wang.

Research Statement

My research combines formal methods, automated reasoning, programming language, and cryptography to achieve security, verifiability, and confidentiality in practical and challenging scenarios.

Graduate Research Opportunities

I am looking for motivated and energetic Ph.D. students. Candidates are expected to have a solid background in Computer Science. No prior experience in cryptography or formal methods is required. However, candidates must be brave and eager to learn new things. The highest standard is required for research integrity. Please send me an email if you are interested in working with me.

Research Interests

• Trustworthy Machine Learning
• Applied Cryptography
• Formal methods and Automated Reasoning
• Security and Privacy

Selected Articles in Journals

• Weakly Private Distributed Multi-User Secret Sharing

Articles in Conference Proceedings

• Towards Privacy-Preserving Verification (FM 2026)
• Certified but Private: Scalable Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Neural Network Guarantees (NeurIPS 2026)
• HNSecW: A Logarithmic-Time MPC Protocol for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (VLDB 2027)
• Privacy-Preserving Regular Expression Matching Using TNFA 
• Ou: Automating the Parallelization of Zero-Knowledge Protocols
• Weakly Private Distributed Multi-User Secret Sharing  ((IEEE TIT))
• Connect the Dots: Knowledge Graph–Guided Crawler Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (USENIX Security  2026)
• ppSAT: Towards Two-Party Private SAT Solving (USENIX Security  2022)
• ZKSMT: A VM for Proving SMT Theorems in Zero Knowledge  (USENIX Security  2024)
• Towards Practical Zero Knowledge Proof for PSPACE (IEEE SP 2026)
• Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge (CCS2022)
• Founding Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Training on Optimum Vicinity (CCS2026)

Professional Societies

• PC for CAV2025, OOPSLA 2025, 2027, USENIX Security 2026, CCS 2025, 2026, IEEE S&P 2025, 2026, 2027, PoPETS 2025