Hi, I'm Eric H. (Haotian) Deng.
I study how Android hands out power — and how to take it back without asking nicely. 110+ vulnerabilities found, and counting.
I'm a graduate student in Cyberspace Security at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), advised by Prof. Hongwei Li. I earned my B.E. from the School of Cyberspace Security at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) in 2024, working with Prof. Shengli Pan.
My research lives in software and systems security, centered on the Android permission model — the machinery that decides which app may do what, and all the ways that machinery can be talked into saying yes when it should say no. I'm also drawn to AI-for-security.
News
- — SecInfer and MADU accepted to IEEE ICC 2025.
- — ENBT-BA accepted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2023.
Research
Android decides what an app can access — your location, camera, messages, and much more — through its permission system. My work looks for gaps between what that system promises and what it actually enforces. So far, that exploration has led to more than 110 reported security issues across Android's permission mechanisms and related components.
Want to see what these look like? I keep a demo rig where the target is, fittingly, me. ⚡ Try to hack Eric →
Hack Eric
Enough reading. Here's a small interactive demo: you're the attacker, and my phone is the target. Type a command or click an exploit. All targets are Eric. No actual humans (or presidents) were harmed.
This part is an interactive terminal — enable JavaScript to try the pentest. (Everything else on this page works fine without it.)
Publications
Before Android had my full attention, I spent about a year each on secure multi-party computation and on network tomography — one paper apiece, and a lot of respect for how hard both fields are.
-
2025
Haotian Deng, Hongwei Li, Hanxiao Chen, Meng Hao, Pengzhi Xing, Jia Hu, Rui Zhang, Wenbo Jiang. "SecInfer: Secure and Efficient Model Inference on Vertically Partitioned Data." IEEE ICC, 2025.
-
2023
Haotian Deng, Shengli Pan. "Evaluating Network Boolean Tomography under Byzantine Attacks." IEEE GLOBECOM, 2023.
Beyond Work
- I like singing, and I can happily lose an evening going down a rabbit hole of music.
- I'm a stubborn believer in early nights and early mornings — 养生 (yǎngshēng).
- I enjoy history and historical fiction, especially stories that play with time travel and alternate histories.
- When life gets stressful, I sometimes read psychology and philosophy. I particularly enjoy Alfred Adler and Jean-Paul Sartre, who both make me think about what we can actually choose and do.
Contact
Say hi — I like meeting people who read this far.