Yangheran (Lawrence) Piao
Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust PhD Student
About Me
I am a second-year PhD studnet at the School of Informastic, University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Prof. Ross Anderson, Dr. Daniel Woods and Dr. Jingjie Li. My current research interests include security economics, usable security, vulnerability markets and cybercrime.
News and Updates
- 12/2024 My paper titled “The Long Shadow of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Exploring User Discussions on the Legality of Vulnerability Research on Reddit” will appear at Rossfest Symposium. Another paper titled “The Bug Bounty Manifesto: Collectivization and Fairness” is set to appear in the proceedings of the Security Protocols Workshop 2025. I am attending both Rossfest and SPW in Cambridge.
- 9/2024 My paper titled “Study club, labor union or start-up? Characterizing teams and collaboration in the bug bounty ecosystem” has been accepted for IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2025.
- 7/2024 My poster titled “Finding bugs with friends: Incentivizing vulnerability discovery through teaming and collaboration” was presented at PETS 2024, Bristol, UK.
Selected Publication
- Yangheran Piao, Temima Hrle, Daniel W. Woods, Ross Anderson. Study club, labor union or start-up? Characterizing teams and collaboration in the bug bounty ecosystem. In 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’25), 2025
- Pengyuan Chen, Lei Zhao, Yangheran Piao, Hongwei Ding, et al. Multimodal visual-textual object graph attention network for propaganda detection in memes. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 83(12), 2024, 36629-36644
- Kai Ye, Yangheran Piao, Kun Zhao, Xiaohui Cui. Graph enhanced bert for stance-aware rumor verification on social media. In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN’21), 2021
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant:
- Usable Security and Privacy (INFR11158/11230), University of Edinburgh, Spring 2025
- Security Engineering (INFR11208/11228, 74 students), University of Edinburgh, Spring 2024 (Teaching Videos, PDF of the Book)
- Network Security (3150530011021, 52 students), Wuhan University, Spring 2020
- Assisting in Master’s Thesis Advising:
- Harita Lolla (2023-2024)
Professional Activities
Contact
- Email: lawrence.piao [at] ed.ac.uk
- Office address: 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh
