Hi, this is Ying Li. I’m a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in the ECE department at UCLA, working with Prof. Yuan Tian. I received my B.E. in Cybersecurity from the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, in 2021. I was also a research Assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong(CUHK).

I study the security and privacy of modern software systems, combining AI (e.g., large language models) with using formal methods and program analysis to make software systems secure. My research focuses on (a) enforcing software to meet rigorous security standards and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR), (b) automatically repairing and mitigating security risks and privacy issues in software, (c) and applying traditional security analysis methods (e.g., static analysis or fuzzing) to uncover vulnerabilities in AI systems.

🔥 News

2025.09: 🎉🎉One paper got accepted to IEEE S&P 2026! See you in San Francisco!
2025.08: 🎉🎉One paper got accepted to PoPETS 2026!
2025.08: 🎉🎉I was Awarded USENIX Security Distinguished Artifact Reviewer!
2025.08: 🎉🎉One paper got accepted to NDSS 2026, see you in San Diego!
2025.06: 🎉🎉I started my internship at AWS, see you in New York!

📝 Selected Publications

^* presents equal contribution

[S&P 26’] Breaking the illusion: Automated Reasoning of GDPR Consent Violations. Ying Li, Wenjun Qiu, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Kunlin Cai, Michelangelo van Dam, Lisa Austin, David Lie, Yuan Tian
[PoPETs 26’] Location-Enhanced Information Flow for Home Automations. McKenna McCall, Ben Weinshel, Kunlin Cai, Ying Li, Eric Zeng, Devika Manohar, Lujo Bauer, Limin Jia, Yuan Tian
[Usenix Security 25’] SoK: Towards Effective Automated Vulnerability Repair. Ying Li, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Bomin Wei, Gang Wang, Yuan Tian [PDF]
[Usenix Security 23’] CarpetFuzz: Automatic Program Option Constraint Extraction from Documentation for Fuzzing. Dawei Wang, Ying Li, Zhiyu Zhang, Kai Chen [PDF] [Code]
[CCS 22’] Clues in Tweets: Twitter-Guided Discovery and Analysis of SMS Spam. Siyuan Tang, Xianghang Mi, Ying Li, Xiaofeng Wang, Kai Chen [PDF] [Code]
[WWW 25’] Detecting and Understanding the Promotion of Illicit Goods and Services on Twitter. Hongyu Wang^*, Ying Li ^*, Ronghong Huang, Xianghang Mi.[PDF]
See more in Google Scholar

🎖 Honors and Awards

2025.08 Distinguished Artifact Reviewer, Usenix Security 2025
2025.07 Student Travel Grant, Usenix Security 2025
2024.02 Student Travel Grant, NDSS 2024
2024.01 OpenAI Researcher Access Program, OpenAI 2024
2023.10 Student Mentee, ACM CCS 2023
2021.06 Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Sichuan Province
2020.05 Good Future Scholarship, Sichuan University (1/126)
2018.12 Cybersecurity Merit Student Scholarship

📖 Educations

2023.09 - present, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles
2021.09 - 2023.04, Institue of Information and Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
2017.09 - 2021.06, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, China.
2019.07 - 2019.08, Summer School in CS, National University of Singapore.

💻 Experience

2025.06 - 2025.09, Applied Scientist Intern, AWS.
2023.06 - 2023.09, Research Assistant, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

🏃‍♀️ Services

Program Committee: MSR’2024(junior PC), ACM CCS’23 AEC, ISSTA’24 AEC, ACM CCS’24 AEC, PoPETS’25 AEC, Usenix Security 25’AEC, NeurIPs 2025
External Reviewer: Oakland’24, Usenix Security’24, Oakland’25,
Leadership: LACC‘24 Coordinator
Teaching Assistant: Computer Security (UCLA ECE 117/CS 38 )