PhD student in

Haotian Chu

My research focuses on building secure, scalable, and trustworthy systems. I am particularly interested in translating advances in security and privacy into production environments, as well as understanding the emerging challenges posed by AI-driven agentic systems.

Taro

About Me

I'm a third-year PhD student in cryptography at Northwestern University, advised by Prof. Xiao Wang. Before joining Northwestern, I obtained my bachelor's degree from the ACM Honors Class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In my junior year at SJTU, I worked as a student intern at LATTICE Lab, advised by Prof. Yu Yu. During this internship, I mainly worked on proving the security of cryptographic primitives with low-level methods. Last fall, I was a research intern at Chainlink Labs, advised by Gregory Neven.

I have experience designing and building secure, scalable software systems, ranging from research prototypes to production-oriented platforms. My work includes developing advanced security and privacy technologies, building AI-powered agent systems, and creating infrastructure that bridges cutting-edge research with real-world applications. I have also designed and deployed agentic workflows and AI platforms for decentralized collaboration and task execution, including BountyLand.

Publications

An Efficient ZK Compiler from SIMD Circuits to General Circuits

Dung Bui, Haotian Chu, Geoffroy Couteau, Xiao Wang, Chenkai Weng, Kang Yang, Yu Yu. Journal of Cryptology 2024.

This work is done during my internship in Xiao's lab (in my senior year as an undergrad). In this paper, Xiao and I found a general framework for building efficient zero-knowledge proofs, a core technique in modern cryptography.

This is a rather theoretical and algorithmic paper focused on methodological improvement, showing how to transform a parallelized algorithm into general-purpose protocols. We also present concrete instantiations, implementation, and benchmarks.

This paper is accepted by Journal of Cryptology 2024.

Private Signaling Secure Against Actively Corrupted Servers

Haotian Chu, Xiao Wang, Yanxue Jia. Shepherding completed for CCS 2026.

Private signaling addresses the challenge that users cannot efficiently retrieve their transactions on privacy-preserving chains, where transaction data is encrypted by design. This is a significant bottleneck for user experience in large Web3 systems such as Zcash and Aztec.

Prior work addresses this problem using hardware security, while we provide an algorithmic solution with rigorous mathematical proofs of security. I developed both the core idea and the full implementation independently.