Prof. WU Daoyuan Received Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS Symposium 2025

Prof. WU Daoyuan, Research Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, won a Distinguished Paper Award at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025, held in San Diego, California, United States, from February 24 to 28. This marks the first time that a Hong Kong university has received this prestigious recognition at NDSS.

The award-winning paper, titled “PropertyGPT: LLM-driven Formal Verification of Smart Contracts through Retrieval-Augmented Property Generation”, presents PropertyGPT, a groundbreaking tool that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate the formal verification of smart contracts. The paper was co-authored with collaborators from Singapore Management University, MetaTrust Labs, and Nanyang Technological University.

By embedding existing human-written properties into a vector database, the team developed a method to generate customized properties for unknown code. This innovation addresses the critical need for automated property generation, enabling enhanced security for smart contracts that manage significant cryptocurrency assets. Their work demonstrates that PropertyGPT can achieve an impressive 80% recall rate and successfully identify vulnerabilities, showcasing its potential impact on the cybersecurity landscape.

First held in 1993, NDSS is known as one of the world’s top four cybersecurity conferences. The 2025 Symposium attracted almost 700 researchers and practitioners from around the world to discuss the latest research and developments in Internet security research.