About me

I am Kailai Cui. I am a first year PhD student in CSE at the University of Michigan. My advisor is Professor Kang Shin.

My research interests include mobile computing systems, and the security of such systems. I am currently working on a novel battery-enabled anti-theft vehicle immobilizer, Bleuth, collaborating with Professor Liang He from the University of Colorado, Denver. This project tackles the vulnerability of existing wireless communication based vehicle keys. Bleuth allows drivers to send authentication code to battery through modulated current fluctuation on the vehicle's power line.

I finished my undergraduate studies at William & Mary, where I worked under the supervision of Dr. Gang Zhou. A major project I participated in is Light Auditor, in which we tackled IoT privacy via power side-channel auditing.

Besides computer science, I was also a student of mathematics. I worked on computational group theory with Dr. Eric Swartz. I read about algorithms that search for permutation group elements by observing their actions on different graphs. The math classes I took, including analysis, algebra and topology have trained me to think rigorously and understand abstract concepts.