Hello, I'm Hongbo Chen 👋

System Security · Confidential Computing · Programming Languages

I’m a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington, advised by Prof. XiaoFeng Wang. I also worked closely with Prof. Haixu Tang and Prof. Danfeng Zhang.

My research mainly focuses on system security, especially confidential computing, program verification, and leveraging programming language features to enhance security. I’m also interested in LLM for security, programming languages, and neuroscience. Currently, I’m exploring GPU TEE and would like to work on security of BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) in the future.

Besides security research, I’m also interested in photography (check my 1x), tennis, HiFi, anime, board games and video games.

Profile photo

Selected Publications

  • 2025
    Agora: Trust Less and Open More in Verification for Confidential Computing
    Hongbo Chen, Qinying Zhou, Shaokai Yang, Shiqing Dang, Xing Han, Danfeng Zhang, Fan Zhang, XiaoFeng Wang
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA 2025)
    arXiv
  • 2025
    PICACHV: Formally Verified Data Use Policy Enforcement for Secure Data Analytics
    Qinying Zhou, Hongbo Chen, Danfeng Zhang, XiaoFeng Wang
    34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 25)
  • 2025
    LineBreaker: Finding Token-Inconsistency Bugs Using Large Language Models
    Hongbo Chen, Yifan Zhang, Xing Han, Huanyao Rong, Yuheng Zhang, Tianhao Mao, Hang Zhang, XiaoFeng Wang, Luyi Xing, Xun Chen
    Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025)
  • 2023
    A Verified Confidential Computing as a Service Framework for Privacy Preservation
    Hongbo Chen, Haobin Hiroki Chen, Mingshen Sun, Kang Li, Zhaofeng Chen, Xiaofeng Wang
    32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23)
    PDF Code Slides
  • 2022
    Robbery on DevOps: Understanding and Mitigating Illicit Cryptomining on Continuous Integration Service Platforms
    Zhi Li, Weijie Liu, Hongbo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Xiaojing Liao, Luyi Xing, Mingming Zha, Hai Jin, Deqing Zou
    2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
  • 2021
    Understanding TEE Containers, Easy to Use? Hard to Trust
    Weijie Liu, Hongbo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Zhi Li, Danfeng Zhang, Wenhao Wang, Haixu Tang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.01923
    arXiv
  • 2021
    Practical and Efficient in-Enclave Verification of Privacy Compliance
    Weijie Liu, Wenhao Wang, Hongbo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Yaosong Lu, Kai Chen, Xinyu Wang, Qintao Shen, Yi Chen, Haixu Tang
    2021 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
    PDF Code