Ya-Nan Li

About Me

I am a final year PhD candidate at USYD, supervised by Prof. Qiang Tang. Before moving to USYD, I have had 2-year PhD study at New Jersey Institute of Technology under Prof. Qiang Tang's supervision. Prior to that, I got my master's degree from Beihang University and my bachelor's degree from Shandong University.

Research Interests

My research interests primarily focus on cryptography for real-world systems, particularly the design and formal analysis of end-to-end encrypted cloud services and privacy-preserving yet compliant cryptocurrency exchanges.

Selected publications (Full list)

Authors are in alphabetical order.

• CCS'25 End-to-End Encrypted Git Services

  With Yaqing Song, Qiang Tang, and Moti Yung.

  ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2025

• NDSS'24 Pisces: Private and Compliable Cryptocurrency Exchange

  With Tian Qiu and Qiang Tang.

  Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024

  Code PDF Slides

• ASIACRYPT'23 Efficient Secure Storage with Version Control and Key Rotation

  With Long Chen, Hui Guo, and Qiang Tang.

  Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2023

  PDF Slides

• USENIX SEC'22 End-to-Same-End Encryption: Modularly Augmenting an App with an Efficient, Portable and Blind Cloud Storage

  With Long Chen, Qiang Tang, and Moti Yung.

  USENIX Security Symposium 2022
  The extended version is publised in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) 2025

  Code PDF Video Journal version

• ASIACRYPT'20 CCA Updatable Encryption Against Malicious Re-Encryption Attacks

  With Long Chen and Qiang Tang.

  Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2020

  PDF Video

Manuscripts

• Charon: Private Cryptocurrencies Trading in Dark Pool

  With Quanhao Chen, Tian Qiu, and Qiang Tang.

Hornors and Awards

• USYD Faculty of Engineering Career Advancement Award, 2024
• SDU Outstanding Graduate, 2016
• National Scholarship (1st/129) 2013
• SDU Outstanding Student Scholarship, three times 2013 - 2015
• The Second Award of Shandong College Student Electronic Design Competition, 2014
• BUAA First Prize Scholarship, twice 2017 - 2018

Academic Service

• Program Committee Member for CRYPTO VALLY Conference 2025
• Reviewer for
• 2025: S&P;
• 2024: CRYPTO; S&P; NDSS; CCS; USENIX Security; ASIACRYPT
• 2023: EUROCRYPT; S&P;NDSS; ASIACRYPT; ICDCS
• 2022: CCS; USENIX Security; PKC; ICDCS; AsiaCCS;
• 2021: USENIX Security; ASIACRYPT; ESORICS; AsiaCCS; ACNS
• 2020: ASIACRYPT; AsiaCCS
• 2019: ESORICS; ACISP

Teaching Experience

I participated in the designing and coordination, and gave tutorials of the two courses:

• CSEC 5619: Applied Cryptography, S1 2023&2024&2025
• COMP 4617/5617/8617: Empirical Security Analysis and Engineering, S2 2023&2024.

Mentoring Experience

I'm honored to mentor several postgraduate and undergraduate students for research, one-year honours, and internship, some of whom have got interesting results and first class honours.