Faculty

Biography

Dr. Lau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Engineering and the Director of the Mobile Technologies Centre (MobiTeC) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Wing received the B.S.(Eng) degree from the University of Hong Kong and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Before returning to academia, Wing worked in the US industry for a decade: He was a Member of Technical Staff with the Performance Analysis Department, Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, where he conducted research in high-speed networking protocols and systems. Wing also had a stint with Qualcomm, San Diego, California where he designed the architecture and protocols for Next Generation Wireless services and actively contributed to their standardization in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and 3GPPs. 

Wing holds 19 U.S. patents and his research findings have culminated in more than 120 publications in major international conferences and journals. His recent research interests include: Security and Privacy of Online Social Networks, Single-Sign-On protocols and Mobile Payment Systems; Representation Learning for Temporal Interaction Graphs and its applications; Online Machine Learning algorithms; Resource allocation and Optimization for Cloud Computing/ Big Data Processing Systems; High-capacity Authenticated 2D barcodes and their applications. Dr. Lau is/ has been a Technical Program Committee member of ACM Sigmetrics, MobiHoc, IEEE INFOCOM, SECON, WiOpt, ICC, GLOBECOM, WCNC, VTC and the International Teletraffic Congress, etc. He was also a Guest Editor for the Special Issue on High-speed Network Security of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC). For their work on Single-Sign-On SDK security, Wing and his team received the 2018 Internet Defense Prize (2nd-runner up) from USENIX and Facebook. 

Recent / Selected Publications

(* = student supervised by Wing)

Graph Neural Networks, Online Learning Algorithms

• Handason Da Sun Tam*, Siyue Xie*, Wing Cheong Lau, “GraphAdaMix: Enhancing Node Representations with Graph Adaptive Mixtures,”  the 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), March 2022.
• Siyue Xie*, Handason Da Sun Tam*, Wing Cheong Lau, "CoCoS: Enhancing Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs with Unlabeled Data via Contrastive Context Sharing," the Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-22), Feb 2022.
• Huanle Xu*, Yang Liu*, Wing Cheong Lau, Rui Li, "Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits with Concave Rewards and Fairness Constraints," in the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2020.
• Da Sun Handason Tam*, Wing Cheong Lau, Bin Hu, Qiu Fang Ying, Dah Ming Chiu and Hong Liu, "Identifying Illicit Accounts in Large-Scale E-Payment Networks -- A Graph Representation Learning approach," Artificial Intelligence for Business Security Workshop (AIBS), IJCAI-19, Aug 2019.
• Tong Wu*, Yang Liu*, Ying-Jun Angela Zhang, Wing Cheong Lau, Huanle Xu*, "Missing Data Recovery in Large Power Systems using Network Embedding," IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Jan 2021.

Systems and Network Security

• Xianbo Wang*, Shengcheng Shi*, Yikang Chen*, Wing Cheong Lau, "PHYjacking: Physical Input Hijacking for Zero-Permission Authorization Attacks on Android," in the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), April 2022. [Preliminary results presented in Black Hat Europe Briefings, Dec 2020]
• Ronghai Yang*, Xianbo Wang*, Cheng Chi, Dawei Wang, Jiawei He, Siming Pang, and Wing Cheong Lau, "Scalable Detection of Promotional Website Defacements in Black Hat SEO Campaigns," in the 30th USENIX Security Symposium, Aug 2021.
• Shangcheng Shi*, Xianbo Wang*, Wing Cheong Lau, "Breaking and Fixing Third-Party Payment Service for Mobile Apps," in the 19th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), June 2021, [Preliminary results presented in "Mining and Exploiting (Mobile) Payment Credential Leaks in the Wild," Black Hat Asia Briefings, May 2021.]
• Shangcheng Shi*, Xianbo Wang*, Wing Cheong Lau, "MoSSOT: An Automated Blackbox Tester for Single Sign-On Vulnerabilities in Mobile Applications," ACM AsiaCCS, July 2019.
• Xianbo Wang*, Wing Cheong Lau, Shangcheng Shi*, Ronghai Yang*, "Make Redirection Evil Again -- URL Parser Issues in OAuth," Black Hat Asia Briefings, Mar 2019.
• Zhibo Yang*, Huanle Xu*, Jianyuan Deng, Chen Change Loy, Wing Cheong Lau, "Robust and Fast Decoding of High-Capacity Color QR Codes for Mobile Applications," IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Dec 2018.
• Ronghai Yang*, Wing Cheong Lau, Jiongyi Chen*, Kehuan Zhang, "Vetting Single-Sign-On SDK Implementations via Symbolic Reasoning," in the 27th USENIX Security Symposium, Aug 2018. This work received the 2018 Internet Defense Prize (2nd Runner-up) from USENIX and Facebook.
• Jiongyi Chen*, Wenrui Diao, Qingchuan Zhao, Chaoshun Zuo, Zhiqiang Lin, XiaoFeng Wang, Wing Cheong Lau, Menghan Sun, Ronghai Yang* and Kehuan Zhang, "IoTFuzzer: Discovering Memory Corruptions in IoT through App-based Fuzzing," in the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), Feb 2018.
• Ronghai Yang*, Wing Cheong Lau, Shangcheng Shi*, "Breaking and Fixing Mobile App Authentication with OAuth2.0-based Protocols," 15th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), Kanazawa, Japan, July 2017. [Preliminary results presented in "Signing into One Billion Mobile App Accounts Effortlessly with OAuth2.0," Black Hat Europe Briefings, London, Nov 2016.
• Ronghai Yang*, Guanchen Lee*, Wing Cheong Lau, Kehuan Zhang, Pili Hu*, "Model-based Security Testing: an Empirical Study on OAuth 2.0 Implementations," ACM AsiaCCS, Xian, June, 2016.
• Pili Hu*, Ronghai Yang*, Yue Li* and Wing Cheong Lau, "Application Impersonation: Problems of OAuth and API Design in Online Social Networks," ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN), Dublin, Oct. 2014. [Preliminary results presented in "How to Leak a 100-million-node Social Graph in just one week ? - A Reflection on OAuth and API Design in Online Social Networks," Black Hat USA Briefings, Aug. 2014].
• Chak Man Li*, Pili Hu*, Wing Cheong Lau, Chak Man Li*, Pili Hu*, Wing Cheong Lau, "AuthPaper - Protecting Paper-based Documents/ Credentials using Authenticated 2D Barcodes," in the Procs. of IEEE ICC, June 2015. [Also appeared as a Demo in ACM MobiSys 2014] This work also won the Grand Prize  (Research &Development Category) in the 13th Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Award in Dec 2013.
• Paulo Ayres*, Huizhong Sun*, H. Jonathan Chao, and Wing Cheong Lau, "ALPi: A DDoS defense System for High-speed networks", IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Oct, 2006.
• Y.K. Chan*, H.W. Chan, K.M. Chan, P.S. Chan, T. Chanson, M.H. Cheung, C.F. Chong, K.P. Chow, K.T. Hui, C.K. Hui, C.K. Lam, W.C. Lau, K.H. Pun, Y.F. Tsang, W.W. Tsang, C.W. Tso, D.Y. Yeung and K.Y. Yu, "Intrusion Detection Router: Design, Implementation and Evaluation Using an Experimental Testbed," IEEE Journal of Selected Areas of Communications (JSAC) , Oct, 2006.
• Yoohwan Kim*, Wing Cheong Lau, Mooi-Choo Chuah and H. Jonathan Chao, "PacketScore: A Statistics-based Packet Filtering Scheme against Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks," IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 141-155, April-June, 2006.

Resource Allocation and Optimization for Cloud Computing and Big Data Processing Systems

• Huanle Xu*, Yang Liu*, Wing Cheong Lau, "Optimal Job Scheduling with Resource Packing for Heterogeneous Servers," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Aug 2021, [a shorter version appeared in IEEE Infocom, Apr 2019].
• Huanle Xu*, Yang Liu*, Wing Cheong Lau, Jun Guo, Alex Liu, "Online Resource Allocation with Machine Variability: A Bandit Perspective," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Oct 2020 ; [a shorter version appeared in IEEE Infocom, Apr 2019].
• Yang Liu*, Huanle Xu*, Wing Cheong Lau, "Accordia: Adaptive Cloud Configuration Optimization for Recurring Data-Intensive Applications," IEEE ICDCS 2020, [also appeared as a Poster in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC), Nov 2019].
• Huanle Xu*, Gustavo de Veciana, Wing Cheong Lau, Kunxiao Zhou, "Online Job Scheduling with Redundancy and Opportunistic Checkpointing: A Speedup-Function-Based Analysis," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Apr 2019  [a shorter version appeared in IEEE Infocom, May 2017].
• Huanle Xu*, Wing Cheong Lau, Zhibo Yang*, Gustavo de Veciana, Hanxu Hou, "Mitigating Service Variability in MapReduce Clusters via Task Cloning: A Competitive Analysis," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Oct 2017 [a shorter version appeared in IEEE ICDCS July 2015].
• Huanle Xu*, Wing Cheong Lau, "Optimization for Speculative Execution in Big Data Processing Clusters," in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Feb 2017 [a shorter version appeared in IEEE Infocom Apr 2015].
• Wing Cheong Lau, Vineet Singh, "An Object-Oriented Class Library for Scalable Parallel Heuristic Search," in Proc. of ECOOP'92: European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Utrecht, Netherlands, June 1992, published as Springer-Verlag ``Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 615'', O. Lehrmann Madsen (Ed.).

Networking Protocols and Systems

• Wai Kit Sze*, Yulin Deng*, Wing Cheong Lau, Murali Kodialam, Thyaga Nandagopal and OnChing Yue, "Channel Oblivious Counting Algorithms for Large-scale RFID Systems," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Dec 2015.
• Huanle Xu*, Pili Hu*, Wing Cheong Lau, Qiming Zhang* and Yang Wu*,"DPCP: A Protocol for Optimal Pull Coordination in Decentralized Social Networks," IEEE Infocom, Apr. 2015.
• Ka-Hung Hui*, Onching Yue and Wing Cheong Lau, "FRASA: Feedback Retransmission Approximation for the Stability Region of Finite-User Slotted ALOHA," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Jan. 2013.
• Wee Lum Tan*, Wing Cheong Lau, Onching Yue and Tan Hing Hui*, "Analytical Models and Performance Evaluation of Drive-thru Internet Systems," in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications, Special Issue on Vehicular Communications and Networks, Jan. 2011.
• Wee Lum Tan*, Fung Lam* and Wing Cheong Lau, "An Empirical Study on 3G Network Capacity and Performance," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol.7, No.6, pp-737-750, June 2008 [A shorter version appeared in IEEE Infocom May 2007].
• Murali Kodialam, Thyaga Nandagopal and Wing Cheong Lau, "Anonymous Tracking using RFID tags," in the Procs. of IEEE Infocom 2007, May 2007.
• L. Benmohamed, S. Dravida, P. Harshavardhana, Wing Cheong Lau and A. Mittal, "Designing IP Networks with Performance Guarantees," Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4, Dec. 1998.
• Wing Cheong Lau, Sanqi Li, "Statistical Multiplexing and Buffer Sharing in Multimedia High-Speed Networks: A Frequency Domain Perspective," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, June 1997.

• Wing Cheong Lau, Sanqi Li, "Sojourn-time Analysis on Nodal Congestion in Broadband Networks and its Impact on QoS Specifications,'' in the Proc. of IEEE Infocom, San Francisco, March 1996.

• Wing Cheong Lau, Ashok Erramilli, Jonathan L. Wang and Walter Willinger, "Self-Similar Traffic Generation: The Random Midpoint Displacement Algorithm and Its Properties," in Proc. of IEEE ICC, Seattle, WA., pp. 466-472, 1995.
• Wing Cheong Lau, Sanqi Li, "Traffic Analysis in Large-scale High-speed Integrated Networks: Validation of the Nodal Decomposition Approach," in Proc. of IEEE Infocom, San Francisco, CA., pp. 1320-1329, 1993.