Dr. Shuai Wang and Team Awarded Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE Security and Privacy 2025

We proudly congratulates Dr. Shuai Wang and his research team for receiving the prestigious Distinguished Paper Award at the 46^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2025. This recognition highlights their groundbreaking work on CipherSteal, a novel framework that exposes critical vulnerabilities in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) used to protect neural networks (NNs).

The authors of the award-winning paper include:

• Dr. Yuanyuan Yuan, PhD graduate from CSE, currently a postdoc at ETH
• Dr. Zhibo Liu, postdoc at CSE
• Mr. Sen Deng, PhD student at CSE
• Mr. Yanzuo Chen, PhD student at CSE
• Dr. Shuai Wang, Associate Professor at CSE
• Dr. Yinqian Zhang, Professor at SUSTech
• Dr. Zhendong Su, Professor at ETH Zurich

As the reliance on NNs grows, so does the need to safeguard them from untrusted hosts. However, recent research has revealed that the confidentiality of NNs and user data can be compromised by ciphertext side channels within TEEs, which leak memory write patterns to malicious entities. Dr. Wang and his team, collaborating with researchers from SUSTech and ETH Zurich, demonstrated the severe threat posed by these side channels to NN inputs for the first time, showcasing how sophisticated attacks can reconstruct complex data with alarming accuracy.

In their innovative approach, CipherSteal employs a two-step method—information transformation and reconstruction—optimizing the use of partial input information leaked through ciphertext side channels. The framework has been evaluated across various neural network architectures, including Transformers, and has successfully recovered visually identical inputs under different levels of prior knowledge held by attackers.

The findings of this research challenge the long-standing belief that hardware-based protections like TEEs can fully safeguard neural network computations and user data. The team's work not only highlights critical vulnerabilities but also emphasizes the inherent trade-off between performance optimizations and security, revealing how these optimizations can inadvertently create new attack surfaces.

"Receiving the Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P 2025 is a tremendous honor and validation of our work on CipherSteal. Our research underscores the importance of considering domain-specific constraints in side-channel attacks, enabling us to effectively enlarge the attacking surface with partial information leakage." They expressed.

The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy is one of the premier academic conferences in cybersecurity, featuring cutting-edge research on computer security, cryptography, privacy, and trustworthy systems. This recognition is not only a testament to the innovative research being conducted at CSE but also a significant contribution to the field of cybersecurity.

Congratulations once again to Dr. Shuai Wang and his team for this remarkable achievement!

Dr. Shuai Wang and his research team received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 46^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2025.