David Wagner Professor Carl J. Penther Chair in Engineering Computer Science Division University of California, Berkeley

Research interests. Computer security. I am currently working on security for AI (particularly security for large language models), AI for security, and other topics in computer security. I have previously worked on software security, electronic voting, wireless security, sensor network security, and applied cryptography.

Projects. My group page is here. I'm part of Berkeley's security research group, a member of the ACTION Institute, and co-director of the KACST-UCB Joint Center on Cybersecurity.

I was previously co-PI or PI for SCRUB, the Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing, and the DHOSA project, and I was a member of the TRUST, ACCURATE, Science of Security, and ISAAC projects.

Publications. My technical papers and publications are all available online.

Teaching. I am co-teaching CS 161 in Fall 2026. See my past teaching.

Students. I'm lucky to have the chance to work with a group of outstanding graduate students, postdocs, and other researchers: Sizhe Chen, Yiwei Hou, Zhanhao Hu, Sam Huang, Dennis Jacob, Michael Lavery, Muxi Lyu, Yibo Peng, Rebecca Saul, Karen Shieh, and Yu-Lin (Uriah) Tsai. See also the students I've graduated.

Contacting me. See my contact information for my address and other details. My office hours are Wednesdays, 1:15-2pm in 1110B Gateway.

If you're contacting me to express interest in Ph.D. studies in my group: all admissions decisions are made by the department admissions committee. If you are interested in joining my group, I encourage you to apply to the department's Ph.D. program. I regretfully don't have capacity to meet with potential applicants in advance or respond to individual emails. I do anticipate advising new students and recruiting for new students for the 2026-27 application cycle (focusing especially on AI for security and security of/for AI agents). There is no need to contact me to express interest.

If you're contacting me to inquire about an internship, remote advising, or research collaboration: for undergraduates, I only have opportunities for Berkeley students. I don't have any opportunities for undergraduates at other schools, and I don't have any opportunities for high school students at this time.

Undergrad research: If you're a Berkeley undergrad, see ASTRA for research opportunities related to AI security.

Software. Our group releases code for many of our recent papers on Github.

Also available: PrimeVul, a high-quality dataset of vulnerabilities in code; DiverseVul, a large dataset of vulnerabilities in code; SLIP, a multi-modal model for images and text; OpenCount, a tool to help with auditing of elections conducted using optical-scan paper ballots; AuditBear, a web application for analyzing audit logs from ES&S iVotronic voting machines; Joe-E, a Java-based programming language for secure programming; html-sanitizer-testbed, a suite of tests to probe the security of a HTML sanitizer; and CQual++, a tool for type inference analysis of C and C++ code.