Wenting Zheng



Office: GHC 9015
Email: wenting [at] cmu [dot] edu
CV [Updated April 2023]

I am an assistant professor in CMU's Computer Science Department. I have a courtesy apoointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and am also a core faculty in CyLab. I am also a co-founder and chief scientist at Opaque Systems.

I am broadly interested in system security and applied cryptography, where I work on building secure systems, developing practical cryptographic primitives and protocols, and designing systems for democratizing and accelerating cryptography. Recently, I've been fascinated with building practical systems for secure outsourced computation in the cloud, secure collaborative computation among mutually distrusting parties, and more practical private information retrieval systems. I believe that a combination of systems and advanced cryptography can not only make existing applications more secure, but also enable new applications.

Previously, I was a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley RISE Lab, where I was co-advised by Raluca Ada Popa and Ion Stoica. I received my bachelor and M.Eng. degrees at MIT. I have been very fortunate to work with a number of wonderful people. During my M.Eng., I was advised by Barbara Liskov and worked with Eddie Kohler and Sam Madden.

I was also a co-founder and an organizer for DARE, a diversity-focused program for matching undergraduates to research opportunities.

Teaching

Fall 2023: Distributed Systems
Spring 2023: Security for Software and Hardware Systems
Fall 2022: Distributed Systems
Fall 2021: Cryptosystems: Theory and Practice

Group

I am looking for highly motivated students who are interested in applied cryptography and system security. Please apply to the CMU Ph.D. program!

I'm fortunate to collaborate with a talented set of students!

Edward Chen (Ph.D., co-advised with Fraser Brown)
Andrew Park (Ph.D., co-advised with Elaine Shi)
Qi Pang (Ph.D., co-advised with Virginia Smith)
Siddharth Jayashankar (Ph.D., co-advised with Dimitrios Skarlatos)
William Seo (Undergradudate)
Trevor Leong (Undergraduate)

Alum:
Jinhao Zhu (Masters -> Ph.D. at UC Berkeley)
Helen Mollering (visiting Ph.D.)
Shreya Sharma (Masters)

Preprints

Publications

PIANO: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation. [Paper]
Mingxun Zhou, Andrew Park, Elaine Shi, Wenting Zheng.
To appear, IEEE S&P 2024

Secure Federated Correlation Test and Entropy Estimation.
Qi Pang*, Lun Wang*, Shuai Wang, Wenting Zheng, Dawn Song.
ICML 2023

ADI: Adversarial Dominating Inputs in Vertical Federated Learning Systems.
Qi Pang, Yuanyuan Yuan, Shuai Wang, Wenting Zheng.
IEEE S&P 2023

Silph: A Framework for Scalable and Accurate Generation of Hybrid MPC Protocols.
Edward Chen*, Jinhao Zhu*, Alex Ozdemir, Fraser Brown, Riad Wahby, Wenting Zheng.
IEEE S&P 2023

CostCO: An Automatic Cost Modeling Framework for Secure Multi-Party Computation. [Paper] [Extended version]
Vivian Fang, Lloyd Brown, William Lin, Wenting Zheng, Aurojit Panda, Raluca Ada Popa.
IEEE Euro S&P 2022
Distinguished Paper Award

Cerebro: A Platform for Multi-Party Cryptographic Collaborative Learning. [Paper] [Extended version]
Wenting Zheng, Ryan Deng, Weikeng Chen, Raluca Ada Popa, Aurojit Panda, Ion Stoica.
USENIX Security 2021

Delphi: A Cryptographic Inference Service for Neural Networks. [Paper] [Extended version]
Pratyush Mishra, Ryan Lehmkuhl, Akshayaram Srinivasan, Wenting Zheng, Raluca Ada Popa.
USENIX Security 2020

Helen: Maliciously Secure Coopetitive Learning for Linear Models. [Paper] [Extended version]
Wenting Zheng, Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica.
IEEE S&P 2019

DIZK: Distributing Zero Knowledge Proof Systems. [Paper] [Extended version]
Howard Wu, Wenting Zheng, Alessandro Chiesa, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica.
USENIX Security 2018

High Accuracy Approximation of Secure Multiparty Neural Network Training.
Daniel Ho, Xin Wang, Wenting Zheng, Joseph Gonzalez, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica.
AISys 2017

MiniCrypt: Reconciling Encryption and Compression for Big Data Stores. [Paper] [Slides]
Wenting Zheng, Frank Li, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica, Rachit Agarwal.
EuroSys 2017

Opaque: An Oblivious and Encrypted Distributed Analytics Platform. [Paper] [Slides] [Code] [SparkSummit talk]
Wenting Zheng, Ankur Dave, Jethro Beekman, Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica.
NSDI 2017

SCL: Simplfying Distributed SDN Control Planes. [Paper]
Aurojit Panda, Wenting Zheng, Xiaohe Hu, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Scott Shenker.
NSDI 2017

Fast Databases with Fast Durability and Recovery through Multicore Parallelism [Paper] [Slides]
Wenting Zheng, Stephen Tu, Eddie Kohler, Barbara Liskov.
OSDI 2014

Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases [Paper]
Stephen Tu, Wenting Zheng, Eddie Kohler, Barbara Liskov, Samuel Madden.
SOSP 2013