Biography
I am a second-year PhD student in Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Gang Wang. My research interests include security and privacy in general, networking, measurement, censorship and cybercrime, and embedded systems. Apart from my profession, my enthusiasm also covers Aviations, Motorsports, Photography, Mechanical Engineering, and some other acativities that overlaps with other engineering and sciences fields. I am a FAA-licensed private pilot.
Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
PhD Student in Computer Science
August, 2023 -
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Master of Science in Computer Science
Thesis: VeriSMS: A message verification system for inclusive and trusted patient outreach
August, 2021 - May, 2023
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bachelor of Science in Geography & Geographic Information Science
Minor in Computer Science
August, 2017 - May, 2021
Teaching
Fall 2022, ECE422/CS461 Computer Security I – Teaching Assistant
Spring 2022, ECE422/CS461 Computer Security I – Teaching Assistant
Publications
Email Spoofing with SMTP Smuggling: How the Shared Email Infrastructures Magnify this Vulnerability
Chuhan Wang, Chenkai Wang, Songyi Yang, Sophia Liu, Jianjun Chen, Haixin Duan, Gang Wang
Proceedings of The 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '25) August 13-15, 2025, Seattle, WA, USA. link
Can You Walk Me Through It? Explainable SMS Phishing Detection using LLM-based Agents
Yizhu Wang, Haoyu Zhai, Chenkai Wang, Qingying Hao, Nick A. Cohen, Roopa Foulger, Jonathan A. Handler, Gang Wang
Proceedings of The 21st USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS '25) August 10-12, 2025, Seattle, WA, USA. link
Towards Continuous Integrity Attestation and Its Challenges in Practice: A Case Study of Keylime
Margie Ruffin, Chenkai Wang, Gheorghe Almasi, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Hubertus Franke, Gang Wang
Proceedings of The 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '25) June 23-26, 2025, Naples, Italy.
True Attacks, Attack Attempts, or Benign Triggers? An Empirical Measurement of Network Alerts in a Security Operations Center
Limin Yang, Zhi Chen, Chenkai Wang, Zhenning Zhang, Sushruth Booma, Phuong Cao, Constantin Adam, Alex Withers, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K. Iyer, Gang Wang
Proceedings of The 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '24) August 14-16, 2024, Philadelphia, PA, USA. link
VeriSMS: A Message Verification System for Inclusive Patient Outreach against Phishing Attacks
Chenkai Wang, Zhuofan Jia, Hadjer Benkraouda, Cody Zevnik, Nicholas Heuermann, Roopa Foulger, Jonathan A. Handler, Gang Wang
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24) May 11-16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642027
Revisiting Email Forwarding Security under the Authenticated Received Chain Protocol
Chenkai Wang, Gang Wang
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (WWW '22) April 25–29, 2022, Virtual Event, Lyon, France. DOI: 10.1145/3485447.3512228
Mozilla bug bounty program awarded $1,000 for the Firefox Relay vulnerability August, 2023.
Other Involvements
- Develop proprietary embedded firmware used in production since Dec, 2016;
- Discovered 5 university-wide or course-specific vulnerabilities with PoCs over 4-year undergraduate studies;
- Systematically conduct Computer Security researches since July, 2020;
- Started b23.wtf Redirecting Service which removes user-tracking parameters on Feb, 2021;
- Start Competing in CTF games together with SIGPwny since Feb, 2022; Earned 436pts for team in DiceCTF ’22[1][2];
- Contribution to Cadmium project for running native ArchlinuxARM on Lenovo Chromebook Duet.