Emily Wenger

Research Themes

Trustworthy Computing

Education

• B.S. Wheaton College, 2016
• M.S. The University of Chicago, 2020
• Ph.D. The University of Chicago, 2023

Positions

• Cue Family Assistant Professor
• Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Courses Taught

• ECE 899: Special Readings in Electrical Engineering
• ECE 590: Advanced Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• ECE 291: Projects in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• COMPSCI 394: Research Independent Study

Publications

• Wenger E. AI produces gibberish when trained on too much AI-generated data. Nature. 2024 Jul 25;631(8022):742u20133.
• Nolte N, Malhou M, Wenger E, Stevens S, Li C, Charton F, et al. The Cool andu00a0theu00a0Cruel: Separating Hard Parts ofu00a0LWE Secrets. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 2024. p. 428u201353.
• Li CY, Malhou M, Sotu00e1kovu00e1 J, Garcelon E, Lauter K, Wenger E, et al. Salsa Picante: A Machine Learning Attack On LWE with Binary Secrets. In: CCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2023. p. 2606u201320.
• Wenger E, Shan S, Zheng H, Zhao BY. SoK: Anti-Facial Recognition Technology. In: Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2023. p. 864u201381.
• Shan S, Cryan J, Wenger E, Zheng H, Hanocka R, Zhao BY. Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models. In: 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2023. 2023. p. 2187u2013204.
• Li CY, Wenger E, Allen-Zhu Z, Charton F, Lauter K. SALSA VERDE: a machine learning attack on Learning With Errors with sparse small secrets. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2023.
• Shan S, Ding W, Wenger E, Zheng H, Zhao BY. Post-breach Recovery: Protection against White-box Adversarial Examples for Leaked DNN Models. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2022. p. 2611u201325.
• Pham A, Samragh M, Wagh S, Wenger E. Private movie recommendations for children. In: Protecting Privacy through Homomorphic Encryption. 2022. p. 163u20137.
• Li H, Shan S, Wenger E, Zhang J, Zheng H, Zhao BY. Blacklight: Scalable Defense for Neural Networks against Query-Based Black-Box Attacks. In: Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, Security 2022. 2022. p. 2117u201334.
• Wenger E, Bhattacharjee R, Bhagoji AN, Passananti J, Andere E, Zheng H, et al. Finding Naturally Occurring Physical Backdoors in Image Datasets. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2022.
• Wenger E, Chen M, Charton F, Lauter K. SALSA: Attacking Lattice Cryptography with Transformers. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2022.
• Wenger E, Bronckers M, Cianfarani C, Cryan J, Sha A, Zheng H, et al. "hello, It's Me": Deep Learning-based Speech Synthesis Attacks in the Real World. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2021. p. 235u201351.
• Wenger E, Passananti J, Bhagoji AN, Yao Y, Zheng H, Zhao BY. Backdoor Attacks Against Deep Learning Systems in the Physical World. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2021. p. 6202u201311.
• Shan S, Wenger E, Wang B, Li B, Zheng H, Zhao BY. Gotta Catch'Em All: Using Honeypots to Catch Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2020. p. 67u201383.
• Shan S, Wenger E, Zhang J, Li H, Zheng H, Zhao BY. Fawkes: Protecting privacy against unauthorized deep learning models. In: Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. 2020. p. 1589u2013604.

In The News

• Dorothy, We Donu2019t Use a Floppy Disk Anymore (Jan 14, 2025 | Duke Magazine)
• AI is the Biggest Cybersecurity Question Mark. Is It Also the Answer? (Nov 12, 2024 | Pratt School of Engineering)