🧑‍💻 About Me

I am Zijian Ling, a Ph.D student in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, co-supervised by Prof. Haibo Hu and Dr. Youqian Zhang at ASTAPLE. Prior to this, I received my Master’s training in Cyber Science and Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, advised by Prof. Man Zhou. My research interests lie in Embodied AI Security and IoT/CPS Security, with a particular focus on covert adversarial attacks and sensing-based authentication systems. I study how physical-layer properties—such as acoustics, electromagnetic interference, and multi-sensor coupling—can be exploited or secured in real-world AI systems, aiming to both expose practical security risks and design robust, user-friendly defenses. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in related research directions.

🔥 News

• 2025.12: 🤖 My first-author paper Sirens’ Whisper has been accepted by USENIX Security’26! We reveal a previously unexplored physical-world side channel in voice-driven LLMs, showing that near-ultrasonic signals can be exploited to perform inaudible and robust jailbreak attacks in real-world settings.
• 2025.05: 👋 Our paper CapHandAuth has been accepted by SenSys’25! A new SOTA for capacitive touchscreen-based hand authentication, achieving high accuracy and strong robustness. Congratulations to Xiaojing.
• 2025.03: 🔥 My first-author paper EDST has been accepted by ICME’25! We introduce a query-efficient data-free black-box attack by aligning the substitute training with the attack process itself.

📝 Publications

(* : Equal Contribution, ˆ : Corresponding Author)

• Sirens’ Whisper: Inaudible Near-Ultrasonic Jailbreaks of Speech-Driven LLMs
  Zijian Ling*, Pingyi Hu*, Xiuyong Gao*, Xiaojing Maˆ, Man Zhouˆ, Jun Feng, Songfeng Lu, Dongmei Zhang, Bin Benjamin Zhu. In USENIX Security’26: USENIX Security Symposium, 2026. ( PDF , Website )
• SyncGait: Secure and User-friendly Mutual Authentication for Drone Delivery via Implicit Gait Behaviors
  Zijian Ling, Man Zhouˆ, Hongda Zhai, Yating Huang, Lingchen Zhao, Qi Li, Chao Shen, Qian Wang.
  arXiv. Under TDSC revision ( PDF )
• BioMoTouch: Touch-Based Behavioral Authentication via Biometric-Motion Interaction Modeling
  Zijian Ling, Jianbang Chen, Hongwei Li, Hongda Zhai, Man Zhouˆ, Jun Feng, Zhengxiong Li, Qi Li, Qian Wang.
  arXiv. Under TDSC revision ( PDF )
• Enhancing Data-Free Substitute Training for Black-Box Adversarial Attacks
  Zijian Ling, Wenyu Zhou, Yi Ouyang, Yuting Zhou, Man Zhouˆ.
  In ICME’25: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2025. ( PDF )
• CapHandAuth: Robust and Anti-spoofing Hand Authentication via COTS Capacitive Touch-screens
  Xiaojing Zhu*, Man Zhou*ˆ, Xiaoxiao Qiao, Zijian Ling, Qin Liuˆ, Houzheng Wang, Xiaojing Ma, Zhengxiong Li.
  In SenSys’25: ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2025. ( PDF )

  📑 Other Publications

• [China Patent] 伪造语音识别方法、装置、电子设备及计算机存储介质
  凌子健, 周满, 翟竑达, 王连淼, 陈鑫源, CN121075366A
• [China Patent] 基于隐式步态行为的无人机投递双向认证方法及装置
  周满, 凌子健, 翟竑达, 黄雅婷, 石欣月, 欧阳毅, CN119865812B
• [China Patent] 一种基于高频声信号混合的语音隐私保护方法及装置
  周满, 李宏伟, 徐鹏, 马晓静, 凌子健, 陈林昊, CN119864051B

🎖 Honors & Awards

• Outstanding Graduate (Master’s), 2026
• China National Scholarship (Rank 2, Top 1%), Ministry of Education of PRC, 2025
• First Prize of University Scholarship ×4 (Top 5%), 2021–2025
• Outstanding Graduate (Undergraduate), 2023
• Outstanding Graduation Thesis Award, 2023
• 第十九届“挑战杯”全国大学生课外学术科技作品竞赛“揭榜挂帅”专项赛 – 特等奖 (Top 5), 队长 ( Page )
• 第四届“华为杯”中国研究生网络安全创新大赛全国总决赛 – 三等奖, 队长 ( Page )
• 第九届“强网杯”全国网络安全挑战赛全国总决赛 – 三等奖, 队长

🎓 Professional Services

I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the academic community through program organization and peer review.

Conference

• External Reviewer: ICME’26, IWQoS’25, ICDCS’24

Journal

• TDSC (IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing)
• TIFS (IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security)
• TMC (IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing)