Meet Our Distinguished Scholars

 

Professor Daniel Xiapu LUO is world-renowned leading expert in cybersecurity and blockchain technology, with contributions recognised through more than a dozen prestigious awards. These include the 2023 BOCHK Science and Technology Innovation Prize in FinTech and the 2024 ACM Distinguished Member designation, as well as recognition as being among Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists.

His research achievements have earned exceptional distinction at leading academic conferences. For example, he led his team to be the first to uncover severe double-spending vulnerabilities in mainstream Layer-2 blockchain platforms, such as Arbitrum. This research was recognised with the Distinguished Paper Award at ACM CCS 2024 (the first time researchers in Hong Kong have received this honour) and later received the Best Practical Paper in Cybersecurity Award 2025, with its findings resulting in over USD 500,000 in bug-bounty rewards. His pioneering research on blockchain transaction analysis garnered the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2018, marking the first time since 1996 that authors from East Asia have received this prestigious award. He has received multiple ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at premier software engineering conferences, including ICSE 2024, ISSTA 2022 and ICSE 2021. Additionally, he was honoured with the Best DeFi Papers Award in 2023 and the Best Research Paper Award at ISSRE 2016.

His research has discovered numerous severe security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructures —including blockchain systems, mobile operating systems, IoT platforms and automotive systems—as well as in various applications such as smart contracts and mobile apps, and has consequently gained broad industry recognition. Moreover, his work has been utilised to detect and analyse malware and cyberattacks. 

Professor Luo is a founding member of the HKMA CBDC Expert Group. He also serves as Associate Editor for prestigious journals IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TNET), IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM), and ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), and chairs major international conferences. Within the University, he has been recognised with faculty-level honours, including the Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award for 2019 and 2021, as well as the Faculty of Engineering Award in Research and Scholarly Activities - Outstanding Researcher (Individual) for 2024.