Tianshuo Cong

Tianshuo Cong

Tsinghua University

About Me

My name is Tianshuo Cong (丛天硕). I am currently a postdoctoral researcher (Shuimu Scholar, 水木学者) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (IASTU) (清华大学高等研究院), hosted by Prof. Xiaoyun Wang (IACR Fellow). I received my Ph.D. degree from the Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University in 2023. My Ph.D. advisor is Prof. Xiaoyun Wang. Before that, I got my B.Eng. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2017. Meanwhile, I was a visiting Ph.D. student from August 2021 to December 2023 at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken, Germany, advised by Dr. Yang Zhang. My research interests include the safety, security, and privacy of artificial intelligence (e.g., large foundation models) and lightweight cipher design. I have published papers at top-tier security conferences including IEEE SP, ACM CCS, NDSS, and USENIX Security. Meanwhile, I have served as the PC members for security conferences such as RAID’25, EuroS&P’25, ACSAC’24, PETS’24, and SaTML’25, and I have also been the official invited reviewers for security journals (e.g., TIFS, TDSC, TOPS, etc) and AI conferences (e.g., ICML’25, NeurIPS’25, ICLR’25, etc). Notably, I lead a curated reading list on safety, security, and privacy of large models: Awesome-LM-SSP (Stars).

Education

  • 2017.07 - 2023.06, Ph.D., Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
  • 2021.08 - 2023.01, Visiting Ph.D., CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken, Germany
  • 2013.06 - 2017.06, B.Eng., Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Honors & Awards

  • NDSS’25 Distinguished Poster Award
  • CCS-LAMPS’24 Best Paper Award
  • Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar Program (2023-2025)
  • CACR Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2023)
  • 2nd Prize in Block Cipher Track, National Cryptographic Algorithm Design Competition (2021)

News

🙌 I am looking for self-motivated internships and research assistants. Please drop me an email if you are interested in working with me!

Publications

$^\star$: Equal contribution; $^\dagger$: Corresponding author

Conference

  • PEFTGuard: Detecting Backdoor Attacks Against Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
    Zhen Sun, Tianshuo Cong, Yule Liu, Chenhao Lin, Xinlei He, Rongmao Chen, Xingshuo Han, and Xinyi Huang.
    IEEE S&P 2025 [arxiv] [安全极客] (AR: 257/1740=14.8%, Cycle 2 AR: 151/1001=15.1%)

  • From Purity to Peril: Backdooring Merged Models From “Harmless” Benign Components
    Lijin Wang, Jingjing Wang, Tianshuo Cong$^\dagger$, Xinlei He$^\dagger$, Zhan Qin, and Xinyi Huang.
    USENIX Security 2025 [paper]

  • Safety Misalignment Against Large Language Models
    Yichen Gong, Delong Ran, Xinlei He, Tianshuo Cong$^\dagger$, Anyu Wang$^\dagger$, and Xiaoyun Wang.
    NDSS Symposium 2025 [pdf] [code] [slides] (AR: 211/1311=16.1%, AR Fall: 14.5%)
    🎖️ Artifact Badges: Available, Functional, Reproduced

  • JailbreakEval: An Integrated Safety Evaluator Toolkit for Assessing Jailbreaks Against Large Language Models
    Delong Ran, Jinyuan Liu, Yichen Gong, Jingyi Zheng, Xinlei He, Tianshuo Cong$^\dagger$, and Anyu Wang.
    NDSS'25 Poster [arxiv] [poster] [code] Stars PyPI - Total Downloads (NDSS’25 Poster AR: 37/76=48.7%)
    🏆 Distinguished Poster Award

  • FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts
    Yichen Gong$^\star$, Delong Ran$^\star$, Jinyuan Liu, Conglei Wang, Tianshuo Cong$^\dagger$, Anyu Wang$^\dagger$, Sisi Duan, and Xiaoyun Wang.
    AAAI 2025 [pdf] [arxiv] [code] [slides] Stars (OR: 600/12957=4.6%, AR: 3032/12957=23.4%)
    🎙️ Oral Presentation

  • CL-Attack: Textual Backdoor Attacks via Cross-Lingual Triggers
    Jingyi Zheng, Tianyi Hu, Tianshuo Cong, and Xinlei He.
    AAAI 2025 [pdf] [arxiv] [code] (AR: 3032/12957=23.4%)

  • Have You Merged My Model? On The Robustness of Large Language Model IP Protection Methods Against Model Merging
    Tianshuo Cong, Delong Ran, Zesen Liu, Xinlei He, Jinyuan Liu, Yichen Gong, Qi Li, Anyu Wang, and Xiaoyun Wang.
    CCS-LAMPS'24 [doi] [arxiv] [code] [slides]
    🏆 Best Paper Award

  • Test-time Poisoning Attacks Against Test-time Adaptation Models
    Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, Yun Shen, and Yang Zhang.
    IEEE S&P 2024 [official] [pdf] [arxiv] [code] [slides] (AR: 261/1463=17.8%)

  • SSLGuard: A Watermarking Scheme for Self-supervised Learning Pre-trained Encoders
    Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, and Yang Zhang.
    ACM CCS 2022 [official] [pdf] [arxiv] [code] [slides] (AR: 218/971=22.5%)

Journal

  • On the Design of Block Cipher FESH
    Keting Jia, Xiaoyang Dong, Congming Wei, Zheng Li, Haibo Zhou, and Tianshuo Cong.
    密码学报 [pdf]
    🏆 2nd Prize in Block Cipher Track, National Cryptographic Algorithm Design Competition

Under Review & Manuscript

  • SoK: Benchmarking Poisoning Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning
    Heyi Zhang, Yule Liu, Xinlei He, Jun Wu, Tianshuo Cong, and Xinyi Huang.
    [arxiv]

  • Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey
    Sibo Yi, Yule Liu, Zhen Sun, Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, Jiaxing Song, Ke Xu, and Qi Li.
    [arxiv]

  • On Evaluating The Performance of Watermarked Machine-Generated Texts Under Adversarial Attacks
    Zesen Liu, Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, and Qi Li.
    [arxiv]

  • Robustness Over Time: Understanding Adversarial Examples’ Effectiveness on Longitudinal Versions of Large Language Models
    Yugeng Liu$^\star$, Tianshuo Cong$^\star$, Zhengyu Zhao, Michael Backes, Yun Shen, and Yang Zhang.
    [arxiv]

Others

  • 隐私计算产品通用安全分级白皮书 (2024年)
    Led by Ant Group.
    [pdf]

Services

PC Member of Security and Privacy Conferences

  • EuroS&P 2025
  • ACSAC 2024
  • RAID 2025
  • PETS 2025
  • SaTML 2025

Official Invited Reviewer of AI Conference

  • ICML 2025
  • NeurIPS 2024, 2025
  • ICLR 2025
  • CVPR 2024, 2025
  • AAAI 2025
  • KDD 2025
  • MM 2024
  • ACL 2024
  • ICCV 2025
  • ECCV 2024
  • AISTATS 2025

Official Invited Reviewer of Journals

  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
  • ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS)
  • ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
  • 《信息安全学报》(Journal of Cyber Security)

Session Chair

  • NDSS 2025

Organizer

  • A curated reading list on safety, security, and privacy of large models: Awesome-LM-SSP Stars

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Committee Secretary

  • Tairong Huang (Tsinghua University, 2024/05)
  • Shiduo Zhang (Tsinghua University, 2024/05)
  • Xiao Sui (Shandong University, 2024/05)
  • Han Wu (Shandong University, 2024/05)

📖 Teaching

  • Lecturer of the tutorial on “Safety, Security, and Privacy of Foundation Models” at IEEE WIFS 2024, Rome, Italy (In English, ~4 hours).
  • Teaching Assistant of the Course “Advanced Numerical Analysis”, Fall 2019, Tsinghua University.
  • Teaching Assistant of the Course “Introduction to Information Science and Technology”, Spring 2018, Tsinghua University.

ℹ️ Miscellaneous