Zihao Su
PhD candidate in Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara — SecLab,
advised by Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel.
I work on the security and privacy of systems. Most of that work has been in Virtual Reality (e.g., showing that a headset can leak what you type, and that a platform
can quietly bend what you perceive).
My work spans side-channel attacks, machine learning security, static program analysis, at USENIX Security, NDSS, CHI, and NeurIPS.
Publications
Your Hands Can Tell: Detecting Perception Manipulation in VR Using Hand Movement
Md Aashikur Rahman Azim, Zihao Su, Seongkook Heo
CHI 2025
Honorable Mention Award
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Remote Keylogging Attacks in Multi-user VR Applications
Zihao Su, Kunlin Cai, Reuben Beeler, Lukas Dresel, Allan Garcia, Ilya Grishchenko, Yuan Tian, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna
USENIX Security 2024
33rd USENIX Security Symposium
Invisible Image Watermarks Are Provably Removable Using Generative AI
Xuandong Zhao, Kexun Zhang, Zihao Su, Saastha Vasan, Ilya Grishchenko, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Yu-Xiang Wang, Lei Li
NeurIPS 2024
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
CHKPLUG: Checking GDPR Compliance of WordPress Plugins via Cross-language Code Property Graph
Faysal Hossain Shezan, Zihao Su, Mingqing Kang, Nicolas Phair, Patrick William Thomas, Michelangelo van Dam, Yinzhi Cao, Yuan Tian
NDSS 2023
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
Perception Hacking for 2D Cursorjacking in Virtual Reality
Zihao Su, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Yuan Tian, David Evans, Seongkook Heo
CHI EA 2021
Extended Abstracts
News
Awarded an NSF ACCESS Research allocation — 200,000 ACCESS credits, as Co-PI
2026
Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2025 for “Your Hands Can Tell”
2025
NAIRR Pilot award — $20,000 in cloud credits via CloudBank
2024