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 (in SJTU), I worked as a student intern at LATTICE lab, advised by Prof. Yu Yu. During this internship, I mainly worked on how to prove the security of cryptographic primitives in a low-level method.
Last fall, I was a research intern at Chainlink Labs.

Research Interests

I'm generally interested in zero-knowledge protocols across the entire spectrum—from improving protocol-level efficiency to exploring their applications. I have experience designing frameworks for efficient ZK systems, implementing both interactive ZK and SNARKs, and integrating ZK tools into production-level systems. I am currently developing a post-quantum solution for stateless blockchain, while also preparing a survey on security flaws in contemporary agentic ecosystem.<\p>

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
This work is done during my internship in Xiao's lab (in my senior year).
In this paper, we find a way to construct efficient ZKP by making the best of circuit parallelization.
We build a methodology compiler that can transform SIMD ZK into general one.
We also present some instansiation based on well-known protocols as well as concrete evaluation.
This paper is accepted by Journal of Cryptology 2024.

Private Signaling Secure Against Actively Corrupted Servers
Haotian Chu, Xiao Wang, Yanxue Jia
Private signaling addresses the challenge that users cannot efficiently retrieve relevant information from a public ledger when data is encrypted under different keys. This issue is particularly acute in private chains such as Zcash and Aztec, and remains underexplored. Prior approaches rely on trusted execution environments (TEEs) to delegate this task to untrusted servers. In this work, we introduce a TEE-free protocol based on noveled MPC (multi-party computation) and ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof techniques, with very competitive concrete performance. I developed both the core idea and the full implementation independently.
This work is still in submission.