Minghong Fang

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Louisville. I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2022 to 2024, working with Dr. Neil Gong. I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University in August 2022, advised by Dr. Jia (Kevin) Liu. I am broadly interested in different areas of security, privacy, and machine learning.

[Recruiting PhDs & Interns]: I am actively looking for highly motivated students for Ph.D. positions and research internships. Please email me with your CV and transcripts if you are interested.

Honors and Awards

• IFIP/IEEE Networking Best Paper Runner-up Award, 2024.
• USENIX Security Symposium’20 paper measured as one of the Normalized Top-100 Security Papers since 1981.
• The Web Conference Student Travel Grant, 2021.
• IEEE ICC Student Travel Grant, 2020.
• Research Excellence Award, Iowa State University, 2020.
• ACSAC Student Conferenceship Award, 2018.

Selected Publications [Full List]

• Byzantine-Robust Decentralized Federated Learning. PDF

  Minghong Fang, Zifan Zhang, Hairi, Prashant Khanduri, Jia Liu, Songtao Lu, Yuchen Liu, and Neil Gong.

  In Proc. ACM CCS, 2024.

• Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning-based Wireless Traffic Prediction. PDF

  Zifan Zhang, Minghong Fang, Jiayuan Huang, and Yuchen Liu.

  In Proc. IFIP/IEEE Networking, 2024.

  Best Paper Runner-up Award

• Robust Federated Learning Mitigates Client-side Training Data Distribution Inference Attacks. PDF

  Yichang Xu*, Ming Yin*, Minghong Fang, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

  In Proc. The Web Conference (WWW), 2024 (*co-primary authors).

  Yichang Xu and Ming Yin are undergraduate students mentored by me.

• Poisoning Federated Recommender Systems with Fake Users. PDF

  Ming Yin*, Yichang Xu*, Minghong Fang, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

  In Proc. The Web Conference (WWW), 2024 (*co-primary authors).

  Ming Yin and Yichang Xu are undergraduate students mentored by me.

• Data Poisoning Attacks and Defenses to Crowdsourcing Systems. PDF

  Minghong Fang, Minghao Sun, Qi Li, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Jin Tian, and Jia Liu.

  In Proc. The Web Conference (WWW), 2021 (acceptance rate: 20.6%).

• FLTrust: Byzantine-robust Federated Learning via Trust Bootstrapping. PDF Code

  Xiaoyu Cao*, Minghong Fang*, Jia Liu, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

  In Proc. NDSS, 2021 (*co-primary authors, acceptance rate: 15.2%).

• Influence Function based Data Poisoning Attacks to Top-N Recommender Systems. PDF

  Minghong Fang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, and Jia Liu.

  In Proc. The Web Conference (WWW), 2020 (acceptance rate: 25%).

• Local Model Poisoning Attacks to Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning. PDF Code

  Minghong Fang*, Xiaoyu Cao*, Jinyuan Jia, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong.

  In Proc. USENIX Security Symposium, 2020 (*co-primary authors, acceptance rate: 16.1%).

  Normalized Top-100 Security Papers since 1981