Minghao Zhang | Tsinghua University

About Me

I’m Minghao Zhang (张明昊), a PhD student at the Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University. I conduct my research in Network and Information Security Lab (NISL), under the supervision of Prof. Jianjun Chen.

My research focuses on Network Security and LLM Security. I investigate security vulnerabilities in Internet protocols and LLM systems, with particular attention to how interactions between protocols and system components can undermine security assumptions.

Research Interests

Network Security: Security of the core TCP/IP protocol stack, including protocol state, cross-layer interactions, and interactions between end hosts and middleboxes. I study vulnerabilities and side channels that can lead to traffic manipulation, information leakage, and denial of service.
LLM Security: Security issues in LLM systems and their supporting software, including configuration leakage, insecure model loading and deserialization, and free API usage triggered by middle-components.

Publications

* Equal contribution.

Detecting Insecure Pickle Deserialization of Untrusted Data in Machine Learning Frameworks

Pinji Chen, Yufei Ning, Guanheng Liu, Jianjun Chen, Minghao Zhang, Feiran Qin, Qi Wang, Haixin Duan

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2027.

PDF To appear
Rethinking Isolation in RPKI: Cross-Publication-Origin Attacks on RPKI Validation

Qi Wang, Jianjun Chen, Taofei Guo, Minghao Zhang, Yuheng Zhang, Jingcheng Yang

33rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026.

To appear
LLMThief: Evaluating Configuration Leaking Risks in Commercial LLM App Stores

Pinji Chen, Jinlong Jiang, Jianjun Chen, Feiran Qin, Minghao Zhang, Jiahe Zhang, Haixin Duan, Kaiwen Shen, Hui Jiang

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2026.

PDF Slides
The Danger of Packet Length Leakage: Off-path TCP/IP Hijacking Attacks Against Wireless and Mobile Networks

Guancheng Li*, Minghao Zhang*, Jianjun Chen, Ge Dai, Pinji Chen, Huiming Liu, Yang Yu, Haixin Duan, Zhiyun Qian

IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2025.

PDF

Education

Tsinghua University — Ph.D. Student in Cyberspace Security
September 2025 – Present
Tsinghua University — M.S. Student in Cyberspace Security
September 2024 – June 2025
Huazhong University of Science and Technology — B.S. in Cyberspace Security
September 2020 – June 2024

Experience

QI-ANXIN Technology Group — Research Intern
July 2025 – September 2025

Selected Awards and Honors

Social Practice Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2026
Second Prize Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2025
Outstanding Graduate, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2024
Model Student (三好学生标兵, 20 undergraduates across the university), Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2024
China National Scholarship (Top 1%), Ministry of Education of China, 2022–2024
Provincial First Prize, Lanqiao Cup, 2022
National First Prize, National Information Security Competition, 2021