Yi-Chin Wu ycwu [at] umich [dot] edu yichin.wu [at] berkeley [dot] edu

News!

About

Before joining Pure Storage, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the TerraSwarm Research Center, working with Prof. Stéphane Lafortune at the University of Michigan and Prof. Sanjit Seshia at UC Berkeley. My work focuses on the synthesis of obfuscators that provably guarantee privacy and utility.

I earned my Ph.D. degree in August 2014 in EECS Systems Laboratory (EE:S) at the University of Michigan, where I was working in the Discrete Event Systems (DES) group supervised by Prof. Stéphane Lafortune. After my graduation, I joined the TerraSwarm Research Center.

My research interest lies at the intersection of control, formal synthesis, and network security. Specifically, center to my research is a privacy notion called "opacity" formulated with automata models. Opacity means the impossibility for an outside attacker to derive the true value of the secret in a given system. My work explores algorithmic methods for designing and controlling systems that guarantee the desired opacity specifications.

Link to my CV.

Tools

• VEiP (Verification and Enforcement using Insertion for oPacity)
Open-source tool for verifying opacity and synthesizing opacity-enforcing insertion functions.

Publications

• Y.-C. Wu and S. Lafortune, "Optimal Synthesis of Insertion Functions for Opacity Enforcement", Transactions on Automatic Control (To appear), 2016. [pdf]
• Y.-C. Wu and S. Lafortune, "Synthesis of Insertion Functions for Enforcement of Opacity Security Properties", Automatica, 50(5):p.1336-1348, 2014. [pdf]
• Y.-C. Wu and S. Lafortune, "Comparative Analysis of Related Notions of Opacity in Centralized and Coordinated Architectures", Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, 23(3): p.307-339, 2013. [pdf]

• Y.-C. Wu, V. Raman, S. Lafortune, and S. A. Seshia, "Obfuscator Synthesis for Privacy and Utility", NASA Formal Methods Symposium (To appear), 2016.
• L. K. Carvalho, Y.-C. Wu, R. Kwong, and S. Lafortune, "Detection and Prevention of Actuator Enablement Attacks in Supervisory Control Systems", Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (To appear), 2016.
• Y.-C. Wu, G. Lederman, and S. Lafortune, "Enhancing Opacity for Stochastic Discrete Event Systems Using Insertion Functions", American Control Conference (To appear), 2016. [supplementary proof]
• Y.-C. Wu and S. Lafortune, "Synthesis of Opacity-Enforcing Insertion Functions That Can Be Publicly Known", Conference on Decision and Control , 2015. [pdf]

• Y.-C. Wu, K. A. Sankararaman, and S. Lafortune, "Ensuring Privacy in Location-Based Services: An Approach Based on Opacity Enforcement", Workshop of Discrete Event Systems, 2014. [pdf][slides]

• Y.-C. Wu and S. Lafortune, "Enforcement of Opacity Properties Using Insertion Functions", Conference on Decision and Control, 2012. [pdf][slides]

• Yi-Chin Wu, "Verification and Enforcement of Opacity Security Properties in Discrete Event Systems", PhD Thesis, August 2014. (ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, University of Michigan!)

Teaching Experiences

• EECS 501 Probability and Random Processes, University of Michigan
  Fall 2010, Winter 2011, Fall 2011
• EECS 460 Control Systems Design and Analysis, University of Michigan
  Winter 2010

Other Activities

• I was co-hosting EECS Grad Girls social gathering events starting from Oct. 2012 until I graduated in Aug. 2014.
• I have been participating in many intramural sports games: indoor volleyball, sand volleyball, wallyball, basketball, soccer, and softball. I led my volleyball team to the championsihp in 2010 and my sand volleyball team to the second place in 2009.