Tenured faculty member of cybersecurity group @EEMCS

Bio

Dr. Liang is a tenured faculty member in the Cybersecurity group at TU Delft, where he also leads the CRYPTAI Lab. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from CityU Hong Kong. Prior to joining Delft, Dr. Liang held several academic positions, including as an information security research intern at A*STAR, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, and an academic visitor at universities, e.g., UCL and Northwest University. He was an assistant professor in secure systems at the University of Surrey.

Since joining Delft in 2020, Dr. Liang has gained significant recognition within the cybersecurity and ICT communities. He has secured European funding for several high-impact projects related to cybersecurity and AI, serving as PI and accumulating over 2.5 million euros in funding to the university. His research has led to real-world impact through collaborations, e.g., IBM, Fujitsu, NEC, BIBA, ATOS, with use cases, e.g., smart satellite (ASSURED, Greece), smart transportation (IRIS, Spain), and cross-border biometric data exchange (TENSOR, Portugal).

Dr. Liang’s research, which applies information security tools to tackle cybersecurity challenges, has earned over 5,700 citations. His work has been featured in top-tier conferences, e.g., USENIX Security, NDSS, CVPR, SIGMETRICS, ESORICS, Asiacrypt, and many others, as well as in leading international journals, e.g., IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. He’s also delivered information security keynotes to international conferences and received awards, e.g., distinguished reviewer, best research paper.

A sought-after expert, Dr. Liang has been invited to serve on PC member, as General Chair, and as a Steering Committee member for renowned security and privacy conferences, e.g., USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE Euro S&P, ESORICS, IEEE CSF, PoPETs, as well as keynotes for information security topics. He also serves as an Associate Editor for prominent journals, e.g., The Computer Journal, IEEE Open Journal of the Communication Society, IEEE Systems Journal, Journal of Information Security and Applications, IEEE Transactions on artificial intelligence.

Dr. Liang has contributed to ISO standards, as a member of the BSI (when he was in UK) and as part of the NEN committee 381027 “Cybersecurity & Privacy” in the Netherlands. He has also been invited to serve on funding review committees and panels for NWO (Dutch research council) and other external funding bodies. As one of the founding members, he contributed to the development and settlement of APNet (a national network supporting assistant professors across the Netherlands).

Dr. Liang is a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy, UK, and holds UTQ, the Netherlands. Since 2016, he has been involved in designing, teaching, and evaluating MSc, Bachelor’s courses, as well as supervising MSc, PhD theses in countries e.g., Finland, UK, the Netherlands.

Research Interests

Data protection, privacy-preserving federated learning, attacks on AI \& secure systems, blockchain R\&D. Please take a look at the research outputs, with references on Google Scholar top publication venues, core conference/journal ranking and CSRankings: Cybersecurity.

Research Projects

  1. REWIRE: REWiring the ComposItional Security VeRification and AssurancE of Systems of Systems Lifecycle (No. 101070627) and spans on the period 2022-2025, Primary Investigator. REWIRE envisions a holistic framework for continuous security assessment of open-source and open-specification hardware and software for IoT devices and the development of cybersecurity certification in accordance with the requirements and guidelines of recent EU Cybersecurity Act.
  2. TANGO: Digital Technologies ActiNg as a Gatekeeper to information and data flOws (No. 101070052, 2022-2025), Primary Investigator. TANGO will establish a stronger cross-sector data sharing, in a citizen-centric, secure and trustworthy manner, by developing innovative solutions while addressing environmental degradation and climate change challenges.
  3. IRIS: H2020-SU-DS-2020, (no. 101021727, 36 months, 2021-2024), Primary Investigator. IRIS aims to establish the first dedicated online training and cyber exercises to prepare CERTs/CSIRTs to collaboratively protect critical infrastructures and systems against cross-border AI and IoT threats. Pilot demonstrators will be conducted in Helsinki, Tallinn, and Barcelona.
  4. ASSURED H2020-SU-ICT-2018-2020, (no. 952697, 36 months, 2020-2023), Primary Investigator. ASSURED introduces an innovative, formally verified runtime assurance framework for securing CPS supply chains: by leveraging edge computing ecosystems, a universal distributed solution is developed for the transformation of CPSoS into distributed safety-critical CPSoS solutions, hosting multiple mixed-criticality applications. Completed.
  5. CUREX funded by the European Commission, H2020-SC1-FA-DTS-2018-1/SU-TDS-02-2018 (36 months, 2018-2021), Co-Investigator. Completed.
  6. SPEAR funded by the European Commission, H2020-DS-SC7-2017/DS-07-2017-RIA (36 months, 2018-2021), Co-Investigator. Completed.
  7. SECONDO funded by the European Commission, H2020-MSCA-RISE-2018/ENG, (48 months, 2018-2022), Co-Investigator. Completed.
  8. FutureTPM funded by the European Commission, H2020-DS-2016-2017/DS-06-2017-RIA, (36 months, 2017-2020), Co-Investigator. Completed.

Selected Academic Activities

Conference contributions:

Associate editor:

NEN cybersecurity and privacy committee, ISO/IEC SC27 Work Group 2 (former UK).

Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (UK).

Supervision

We have a group of Bachelor, MSc, PhD and Post-doc researchers working in several cybersecurity topics, please take a look at our CRYPTAI Lab.