Hi! I am Lingzhi Wang!(You can also call me Lexus). I am now a final-year PhD student in Comupter Science, Northwestern University, advised by Prof. Yan Chen. I obtained my Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2020.

My research focuses on applying advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to strengthen both cyber offense and defense, as well as to optimize cloud architectures. Specifically, I explore the following questions:

• How can cutting-edge AI methods be integrated into the development of practical security and network systems such as Security Operation Centers (SOCs), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) systems, and serverless applications (FaaS)?
• How can we model human knowledge and reasoning processes to carry out complex offensive cybersecurity tasks such as penetration testing and red teaming?
• With LLMs, how can we represent, learn, and apply abstract knowledge in practical cybersecurity systems, as well as other industrial areas?

News 📰

• 6/23/2025: I began my internship as a research intern at SRI.
• 4/1/2025 Our paper PentestAgent: Incorporating LLM Agents to Automated Penetration Testing has been accepted by AsiaCCS’25.
• 2/25/2025: I’ll be attending NDSS’25 in San Diego to present our work Incorporating Gradients to Rules: Towards Lightweight, Adaptive Provenance-based Intrusion Detection. See you in San Diego!
• 12/6/2024: I passed my PhD prospectus.
• 8/30/2024 Our paper Incorporating Gradients to Rules: Towards Lightweight, Adaptive Provenance-based Intrusion Detection has been accepted by NDSS’25.