Haowen Xu
Master's Student in Computer Science
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
I am a master’s student in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). I received my B.Eng. in Communication Engineering from Nanjing University in 2024.
My research lies at the intersection of trustworthy artificial intelligence and cyber-physical systems security. I develop methods for understanding, detecting, and mitigating security risks in AI agents and connected physical systems, with an emphasis on robust and deployable defenses.
Research Interests
Trustworthy AI
LLM agent safety, multi-agent systems, behavior-based threat detection, and machine learning robustness.
Cyber-Physical Systems Security
Side-channel attacks, electromagnetic leakage, and privacy risks in wearable and IoT systems.
Recent News
All news- Joined ByteDance Security to work on AI security.
- Our paper AcMAS was accepted at ICML 2026.
- Our work EMPalm was selected for a talk at New England Security Day.
- Our paper EMPalm was accepted at ACM SenSys 2026.
Selected Publications
All publicationsWhen Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems
Haowen Xu, Xue Tan, Lei Ma, Zhihao Zhang, Chao Wang, Qingze Wang, Ping Chen, Jun Dai, and Xiaoyan Sun.
EMPalm: Exfiltrating Palm Biometric Data via Electromagnetic Side-Channels
Haowen Xu, Tianya Zhao, Xuyu Wang, et al.
VibLeak: Towards Practical Covert Data Leakage via Phone Vibrations
Junye Jiang, Jingcheng Ju, Haowen Xu, Zhenlu Tan, Duohe Ma, Jun Dai, and Xiaoyan Sun. PDF
MagWatch: Exposing Privacy Risks in Smartwatches through Electromagnetic Signals
Haowen Xu, Tianya Zhao, et al. PDF
Experience
AI Security Research
ByteDance Security
Investigating behavior-level security for LLM agents, with a focus on how tool-use patterns, execution context, and policy constraints can jointly characterize malicious or unintended behavior. Designing and empirically evaluating lightweight detection and prefiltering methods to improve threat coverage, robustness, and false-positive control in production-scale agent systems.
Education
M.S. in Computer Science
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA
B.Eng. in Communication Engineering
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China