Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand

Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand

Hi! I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I am a member of the Security and Privacy Research Group, advised by Prof. Patrick McDaniel.

I have received my M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and my Diplôme d'Ingénieur (M.S. and B.S. in Engineering Sciences) from the French Engineering School École Centrale de Lyon, as well as my B.S. in General Mathematics and Applications from Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University.

Research Interests: I am interested in building more secure and trustworthy systems. My current research focuses on open source software security and trustworthy AI (especially LLMs).

Email: contact@jcnf.me

Address: 1205 University Ave., Room 4576, Madison WI 53706, USA

Recent & Selected Publications

  • Targeting Alignment: Extracting Safety Classifiers of Aligned LLMs
    Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand, Yohan Beugin, Eric Pauley, Ryan Sheatsley, Patrick McDaniel
    IEEE Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning Conference (SaTML), 2026
    PDF 
    @inproceedings{noirot_ferrand_targeting_2026,
                         author = {Jean-Charles {Noirot Ferrand} and Yohan Beugin and Eric Pauley and Ryan Sheatsley and Patrick McDaniel},
                         booktitle = {IEEE Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning Conference (SaTML)},
                         month = {March},
                         title = {{Targeting} {Alignment}: {Extracting} {Safety} {Classifiers} of {Aligned} {LLMs}},
                         url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16534},
                         year = {2026}
                        }
  • LibIHT: A Hardware-Based Approach to Efficient and Evasion-Resistant Dynamic Binary Analysis
    Changyu Zhao, Yohan Beugin, Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand, Quinn Burke, Guancheng Li, Patrick McDaniel
    Workshop on Software Understanding and Reverse Engineering (SURE), 2025
    PDF Code 
    @inproceedings{zhao_libiht_2025,
                         address = {Taipei, Taiwan},
                         author = {Changyu Zhao and Yohan Beugin and Jean-Charles {Noirot Ferrand} and Quinn Burke and Guancheng Li and Patrick McDaniel},
                         booktitle = {Workshop on Software Understanding and Reverse Engineering (SURE)},
                         keywords = {workshop},
                         month = {October},
                         title = {{LibIHT}: A Hardware-Based Approach to Efficient and Evasion-Resistant Dynamic Binary Analysis},
                         url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16251},
                         year = {2025}
                        }
  • On the Robustness Tradeoff in Fine-Tuning
    Kunyang Li, Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand, Ryan Sheatsley, Blaine Hoak, Yohan Beugin, Eric Pauley, Patrick McDaniel
    IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025
    PDF 
    @inproceedings{li_robustness_2025,
                         author = {Kunyang Li and Jean-Charles {Noirot Ferrand} and Ryan Sheatsley and Blaine Hoak and Yohan Beugin and Eric Pauley and Patrick McDaniel},
                         booktitle = {IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
                         month = {October},
                         title = {On the {Robustness} {Tradeoff} in {Fine}-{Tuning}},
                         url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14836},
                         year = {2025}
                        }
  • Adversarial Agents: Black-Box Evasion Attacks with Reinforcement Learning
    Kyle Domico, Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand, Ryan Sheatsley, Eric Pauley, Josiah Hanna, Patrick McDaniel
    In submission, 2025
    PDF 
    @misc{domico2025adversarialagentsblackboxevasion,
                         archiveprefix = {arXiv},
                         author = {Kyle Domico and Jean-Charles {Noirot Ferrand} and Ryan Sheatsley and Eric Pauley and Josiah Hanna and Patrick McDaniel},
                         eprint = {2503.01734},
                         primaryclass = {cs.CR},
                         title = {Adversarial Agents: Black-Box Evasion Attacks with Reinforcement Learning},
                         url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01734},
                         year = {2025}
                        }
For a complete list of publications, please refer to my publications page.

Recent News

Recent Posts

Professional Activities

Teaching Experience

  • CS 642 - Introduction to Information Security, Course Design, Guest Lecturer, Teaching Assistant Fall 2025

Conferences

Artifact Reviewer
  • Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETs) 2026
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2026
  • Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) 2026
  • USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security) 2025 , 2026
External Reviewer
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025
  • USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security) 2025
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2025
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS) 2024

Other service