Danyu Sun

I am a third year Ph.D. student in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. My advisor is Prof. Zhou Li.

My research interests include security and privacy, with a recent focus on LLM-driven security applications and differential privacy.

Previously, I received my Master Degree at Duke University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Prof. Sudeepa Roy. And I received my my B.S. Degree at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I am serving as a leadership role at the Society of Graduate Electrical Engineers and Computer Scientists (GEECS) at UC Irvine.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  LinkedIn  

profile photo
News
  • Apr 2026: I won the UCI EECS Graduate Student of the Year Award (2025-2026)!
  • Mar 2026: I will start my internship at Roblox this summer. See you at San Mateo!
  • Feb 2026: One paper related to "False Positive in Malicious Domain" got Distinguished Paper Award of NDSS 2026!
Publications
profile photo Indicator of Benignity: An Industry View of False Positive in Malicious Domain Detection and its Mitigation
Daiping Liu, Danyu Sun, Zhenhua Chen, Shu Wang, Zhou Li

NDSS, 2026 🏆 Distinguished Paper Award

[PDF] [Data]

profile photo From Alerts to Intelligence: A Novel LLM-Aided Framework for Host-based Intrusion Detection
Danyu Sun, Jinghuai Zhang, Jiacen Xu, Yu Zheng, Yuan Tian, Zhou Li

Pre-print, 2025

[PDF]

profile photo NetDPSyn: Synthesizing Network Traces under Differential Privacy
Danyu Sun, Joann Qiongna Chen, Chen Gong, Tianhao Wang, Zhou Li

ACM IMC, 2024

[PDF] [Code]

profile photo DP-PQD: Privately Detecting Per-Query Gaps In Synthetic Data Generated By Black-Box Mechanisms
Shweta Patwa, Danyu Sun, Amir Gilad, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Sudeepa Roy

VLDB, 2024

[PDF]

Honors & Awards
  • UCI EECS Graduate Student of the Year award 2025-2026.
  • NDSS 2026 Distinguished Paper Award.
  • UCI Henry Samueli Endowed Fellowship, 2023-2024.
  • UCI Graduate Dean’s Recruitment Fellowship, Fall 2023.
  • Dean’s List at UIUC, 2019-2021.
Service
  • Served as a peer reviewer for ICML 2025
  • Served as a peer reviewer for NeurIPS 2025, 2024
  • Served as a peer reviewer for ICLR 2025
  • Served as a peer reviewer fo AISTATS 2025
Teaching Experience
  • EECS 148/CS 132: Computer Network (2026 Spring, UCI)
  • EECS 148/CS 132: Computer Network (2025 Spring, UCI)
  • Compsci 101: Introduction to Computer Science (2021 Fall to 2023 Spring, Duke University)
Industry Experience
  • Applied Scientist Internship (06/2026--09/2026, Roblox, San Mateo)
  • Research Scientist Internship (06/2025--09/2025, Bytedance, San Jose)

Credits to Jon Barron for the website design.