Jiajun GONG (Aaron)

Jiajun GONG (Aaron)

I received my Ph.D. in cybersecurity from HKUST, where I worked under the supervision of Charles Zhang and Tao Wang. My research focuses on network security and privacy, especially defending against website fingerprinting attacks, with two top-tier security publications.

Working Experience

  • Assistant Researcher in Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China, 2025.04 - present.
  • Research Fellow in School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 2023.03 - 2025.01.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2017.09 - 2022.12.
    • GPA 4.06/4.3
    • Core courses: Cryptography and Security (A+), Theory of Computation (A+), Computer Networks (A+), Machine Learning (A-)
  • B.S. in College of Elite of Education, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 2013.09 - 2017.06.
    • GPA 3.82/4.0 (1/64)
    • Core courses: Mathematical Analysis (94), Advanced Algebra (98), Operating System (94)
  • Visiting student in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Australian National University, 2015.07 - 2016.11.
    • Awarded CSC Scholarships by Chinese Scholarship Council
    • GPA 4.0/4.0

Publications

  • [TIFS 2023] “WFDefProxy: Real World Implementation and Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Defenses”. Jiajun Gong, Wuqi Zhang, Charles Zhang, Tao Wang. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. [Paper] [Code]

  • [S&P 2022] “Surakav: Generating Realistic Traces for a Strong Website Fingerprinting Defense”. Jiajun Gong, Wuqi Zhang, Charles Zhang, Tao Wang. In the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. [Paper] [Sides] [Code] [Dataset]

  • [USENIX 2020] “Zero-delay Lightweight Defenses against Website Fingerprinting”. Jiajun Gong, Tao Wang. In the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. [Paper] [Sides] [Code]

  • [CVPR Workshop 2024] “Unlearning backdoor threats: Enhancing backdoor defense in multimodal contrastive learning via local token unlearning”. Siyuan Liang, Kuanrong Liu, Jiajun Gong, Jiawei Liang, Yuan Xun, Ee-Chien Chang, Xiaochun Cao. In CVPR 2024 workshop. (Best Paper Award) [Paper]

Honors & Scholarship

  • Postgraduate Studentship of HKUST, HK, 2017–2022
  • Meritorious Winner in American Interdisciplinary Contest In Modeling (Top 10%), USA, 2016
  • National Scholarship, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 2015
  • “The Academic Award”, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 2015
  • The First Prize Scholarship, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 2014-2015

Professional Service

  • Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Networking (2025)
  • Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2020, 2024)
  • Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2023, 2024)
  • Reviewer for EAI SecureComm (2023)

Teaching

  • TA for COMP 4451: Game Programming. (2020-2021 Fall)
  • TA for COMP 2711: Discrete Mathematical Tools for Computer Science. (2019-2020 Fall)
  • TA for COMP 3632: Principles of Cybersecurity. (2018-2019 Fall)
  • TA for COMP 4632: Practicing Cybersecurity: Attacks and Countermeasures. (2017-2018 Spring)

Skills

  • Programming Skills:  Python   Golang   C++
  • English Tests:  IELTS 7.5   CET6 594