Hongbo Wen

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, advised by Yu Feng and working closely with Dahlia Malkhi and Yanju Chen. Before UCSB, I received my B.Eng. from Tsinghua University.

I develop program analysis and synthesis techniques to secure complex software systems, with applications in LLM agent security, cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs, and AI-augmented vulnerability discovery. My work has been supported by Ethereum Foundation, Google Security, and a16z crypto.

Email / Google Scholar / GitHub / CV

Publications

* Equal Contribution

arXiv 2026 LLM Agent Security SEMIA: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis Hongbo Wen, Ying Li, Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Yanju Chen, Yuan Tian, Yu Feng pdf
OOPSLA'25 Crypto & ZKP Tabby: A Synthesis-Aided Compiler for High-Performance Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits Junrui Liu, Jiaxin Song, Yanning Chen, Hanzhi Liu, Hongbo Wen, Lev Pearson, Yanju Chen, Yu Feng
IACR 2025 Crypto & ZKP Thunderbolt: A Formally Verified Protocol for Off-Chain Bitcoin Transfers Hongbo Wen, Hanzhi Liu, Jingyu Ke, Yanju Chen, Dahlia Malkhi, Yu Feng pdf
arXiv 2025 AI-Augmented Vuln Discovery Synthesizing Multi-Agent Harnesses for Vulnerability Discovery Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Xinyi Liu, Hongbo Wen, Yanju Chen, Ruijie Fang, Yu Feng pdf
arXiv 2025 LLM Agent Security Your Agent Is Mine: Measuring Malicious Intermediary Attacks on the LLM Supply Chain Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Hongbo Wen, Yanju Chen, Ruijie Fang, Yu Feng pdf
ACM CCS'24 AI-Augmented Vuln Discovery FORAY: Towards Effective Attack Synthesis against Deep Logical Vulnerabilities in DeFi Protocols Hongbo Wen, Hanzhi Liu, Jiaxin Song, Yanju Chen, Wenbo Guo, Yu Feng pdf / bib / code
USENIX Security'24 Crypto & ZKP Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits Hongbo Wen, Jon Stephens, Yanju Chen, Kostas Ferles, Shankara Pailoor, Kyle Charbonnet, Isil Dillig, Yu Feng pdf / bib / code

Zero-Day Discoveries

LLM Agents	Filed 17 zero-day security advisories on OpenClaw/ClawHub agent skills, covering credential leakage, RCE, and PII exfiltration (e.g., clawhub#1911).
DeFi	Discovered 10 zero-day vulnerabilities on BNB Chain DeFi protocols using FORAY, with verified exploit traces matching ≥$21M in historical loss patterns (e.g., Discover).
ZK Circuits	Discovered zero-day vulnerabilities in widely-used Circom projects using ZKAP, including 0xPARC, Polygon-ZK, Axiom, iden3, and privacy-ethereum (e.g., circom-pairing).

Invited Talks

Feb 2026	Tabby: A Synthesis-Aided Compiler for High-Performance Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits	SoCalPLS, USC, Los Angeles, CA
Feb 2025	Tabby: Automated Programming of Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits	ETH Denver, Denver, CO
Feb 2025	Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits	SoCalPLS, UCSD, San Diego, CA
Oct 2024	FORAY: Towards Effective Attack Synthesis against Deep Logical Vulnerabilities in DeFi Protocols	ACM CCS '24, Salt Lake City, UT
Aug 2024	Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits	USENIX Security '24, Philadelphia, PA

Grants & Awards

2024	Ethereum Foundation Academic Grant, Cybersecurity and Privacy Track Topic: Sentinel — Adaptive Counter-Attack Synthesis for Mitigating Onchain Exploits Yu Feng, Hanzhi Liu, Hongbo Wen
2023	Ethereum Foundation Academic Grant, Formal Verification Track Topic: Financial Model-Driven Attack Synthesis for DeFi Yu Feng, Yanju Chen, Hongbo Wen This grant led to the development of FORAY (ACM CCS'24).
2022	Academic Excellence Fellowship, UC Santa Barbara

Experience

2024 – Present	Co-founder & Principal Architect, Riema Labs Led a 50-person engineering team through an AI-first development transformation, shipping cross-chain bridges, Bitcoin-native ZK infrastructure, and user-custody wallet systems serving 150K+ users.
2022	R&D Engineer, Veridise Inc. Smart contract and zero-knowledge proof security. Discovered 30+ critical vulnerabilities in widely-used ZK projects.

Service

2025	USENIX Security '25 Artifact Evaluation Committee
2023 – 2025	Teaching Assistant, CS162 Programming Languages, UC Santa Barbara

Design inspired by Jon Barron