Hongxin Hu
Professor and Associate Chair

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York (SUNY)

Office: 311 Davis Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Email: hongxinh@buffalo.edu
Photo: Hongxin Hu
Quick Links: [ Research | Publications | Teams | Teaching | Awards | Services ]
Short Bio

I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo, SUNY. I am a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2019) and Amazon Research Award (2022). My research spans security, networking, and machine learning. Given the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I have published across a wide range of well-recognized conferences, including security (S&P, CCS, USENIX Security, and NDSS), networking (SIGCOMM and NSDI), machine learning (NeurIPS, ICML, and EMNLP), and human-computer interaction (CHI and CSCW). My research has been funded by NSF (SaTC, CNS, IIS, OAC, SOC, etc.), USDOT, VMware, Amazon, Google, Dell, etc. I am the recipient of the IEEE Big Data Security Senior Research Award in 2025, the ACM SACMAT Test-of-Time Award in 2024, and the Best Paper Awards from ACM ASIACCS (2022), ACSAC (2020), IEEE ICC (2020), ACM SIGCSE (2018), and ACM CODASPY (2014). My research has won the First Place Award in ACM SIGCOMM 2018 SRC. My research has also been featured by the IEEE Special Technical Community on Social Networking and received wide press coverage including ACM TechNews, InformationWeek, Slashdot, NetworkWorld, etc.

News
  • 05/2025 [Senior Research Award]: I am honored to be the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Big Data Security Senior Research Award.
  • 02/2025 [Paper]: Our paper "From Head to Tail: Efficient Black-box Model Inversion Attack via Long-tailed Learning" has been accepted to CVPR 2025.
  • 01/2025 [Paper]: Our paper "APPATCH: Automated Adaptive Prompting Large Language Models for Real-World Software Vulnerability Patching" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2025.
  • 01/2025 [Paper]: Our paper "JBShield: Defending Large Language Models from Jailbreak Attacks through Activated Concept Analysis and Manipulation" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2025.
  • 09/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "I know what you MEME! Understanding and Detecting Harmful Memes with Multimodal Large Language Models" has been accepted to NDSS 2025.
  • 07/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "Is Difficulty Calibration All We Need? Towards More Practical Membership Inference Attacks" has been accepted to CCS 2024.
  • 07/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "A First Look at Security and Privacy Risks in the RapidAPI Ecosystem" has been accepted to CCS 2024.
  • 05/2024 [Test-of-Time Award]: Our paper "Game Theoretic Analysis of Multiparty Access Control in Online Social Networks", published in SACMAT 2014, has been selected for the 2024 ACM SACMAT Test-of-Time Award.
  • 03/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User Generated Content Games Using Large Vision Language Models" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2024.
  • 02/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "A Stealthy Wrongdoer: Feature-Oriented Reconstruction Attack against Split Learning" has been accepted to CVPR 2024.
  • 01/2024 [Paper]: Our paper "Understanding GDPR Non-Compliance in Privacy Policies of Alexa Skills in European Marketplaces" has been accepted to WWW 2024.
  • 10/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "Moderating New Waves of Online Hate with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models" has been accepted to S&P 2024.
  • 07/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "Hairpin: Rethinking Packet Loss Recovery in Edge-based Interactive Video Streaming" has been accepted to NSDI 2024.
  • 09/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "GAN You See Me? Enhanced Data Reconstruction Attacks against Split Inference" has been accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
  • 06/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "SkillScanner: Detecting Policy-Violating Voice Applications Through Static Analysis at the Development Phase" has been accepted to CCS 2023.
  • 05/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "Analysis of COVID-19 Offensive Tweets and Their Targets" has been accepted to KDD 2023.
  • 02/2023 [Paper]: Our paper "Return-to-Non-Secure Vulnerabilities on ARM Cortex-M TrustZone: Attack and Defense" has been accepted to DAC 2023.
  • 12/2022 [Award]: I received UB CSE Outstanding Research Award.
  • 10/2022 [Paper]: Our paper "Multi-level Distillation of Semantic Knowledge for Pre-training Multilingual Language Model" has been accepted to EMNLP 2022.
  • 09/2022 [Paper]: Our paper "xNIDS: Explaining Deep Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems for Active Intrusion Responses" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2023.
  • 09/2022 [Paper]: Our paper "Measuring Data Reconstruction Defenses in Collaborative Inference Systems" has been accepted to NeurIPS 2022.
  • 07/2022 [Paper]: Our paper "Enabling High Quality Real-Time Communications with Adaptive Frame-Rate" has been accepted to NSDI 2023.
  • 05/2022 [Best Paper Award]: Our paper "Understanding and Detecting Remote Infection on Linux-based IoT Devices" won the Best Paper Award at ASIACCS 2022.
  • 04/2022 [Award]: I received an Amazon Research Award for Deep Learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems.
  • 02/2022 [Student]: Congrats to my Ph.D. student Nishant Vishwamitra who will join the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security at UT San Antonio as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
Research Interests
Selected and Recent Publications [Google Scholar] [All Publications]
  • Is Difficulty Calibration All We Need? Towards More Practical Membership Inference Attacks
    Yu He, Boheng Li, Yao Wang, Mengda Yang, Juan Wang, Hongxin Hu, and Xingyu Zhao
    In Proceedings of ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024), Salt Lake City, USA, October 14-18, 2024.
  • A First Look at Security and Privacy Risks in the RapidAPI Ecosystem
    Song Liao, Long Cheng, Xiapu Luo, Zheng Song, Haipeng Cai, Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024), Salt Lake City, USA, October 14-18, 2024.
  • End-Users Know Best: Identifying Undesired Behavior of Alexa Skills Through User Review Analysis
    Mohammed Aldeen, Jeffrey Young, Song Liao, Tsu-Yao Chang, Long Cheng, Haipeng Cai, Xiapu Luo, and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of ACM Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (UbiComp 2024), Melbourne, Australia, October 5-9, 2024.
  • Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User Generated Content Games Using Large Vision Language Models [PDF]
    Keyan Guo, Ayush Utkarsh, Wenbo Ding, Isabelle Ondracek, Ziming Zhao, Guo Freeman, Nishant Vishwamitra and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2024), Philadelphia, PA, USA, August 14-16, 2024
  • A Stealthy Wrongdoer: Feature-Oriented Reconstruction Attack against Split Learning
    Xiaoyang Xu, Mengda Yang, Wenzhe Yi, Ziang Li, Juan Wang, Hongxin Hu, Yong Zhuang and Yaxin Liu
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024), Seattle, WA, USA, June 17-21, 2024
    Acceptance rate: 23.6%
  • Understanding GDPR Non-Compliance in Privacy Policies of Alexa Skills in European Marketplaces
    Song Liao, Mohammed Aldeen, Jingwen Yan, Long Cheng, Xiapu Luo, Haipeng Cai and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Web Conference (WWW 2024), Singapore, May 13-17, 2024
  • Moderating New Waves of Online Hate with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models [PDF]
    Nishant Vishwamitra, Keyan Guo, Farhan Tajwar Romit, Isabelle Ondracek, Long Cheng, Ziming Zhao and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2024), San Francisco, CA, USA, May 20-23, 2024
  • Hairpin: Rethinking Packet Loss Recovery in Edge-based Interactive Video Streaming
    Zili Meng, Xiao Kong, Jing Chen, Bo Wang, Mingwei Xu, Rui Han, Honghao Liu, Venkat Arun, Hongxin Hu and Xue Wei
    In Proceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2024), Santa Clara, CA, USA, April 16-18, 2024
  • GAN You See Me? Enhanced Data Reconstruction Attacks against Split Inference
    Ziang Li, Mengda Yang, Yaxin Liu, Juan Wang, Hongxin Hu, Wenzhe Yi and Xiaoyang Xu
    In Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), New Orleans, LA, USA, Dec 10-16, 2023
    Acceptance rate: 26.1%
  • SkillScanner: Detecting Policy-Violating Voice Applications Through Static Analysis at the Development Phase
    Song Liao, Long Cheng, Haipeng Cai, Linke Guo and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2023), Copenhagen, Denmark, November 26-30, 2023
  • xNIDS: Explaining Deep Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems for Active Intrusion Responses [PDF]
    Feng Wei, Hongda Li, Ziming Zhao and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2023), Anaheim, CA, USA, August 9-11, 2023
  • Analysis of COVID-19 Offensive Tweets and Their Targets
    Song Liao, Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng, Mingqi Li, Nishant Vishwamitra, Hongxin Hu, Feng Luo and Matthew John Costello
    In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2023), Long Beach, CA, USA, August 6-10, 2023
  • Enabling High Quality Real-Time Communications with Adaptive Frame-Rate
    Zili Meng, Tingfeng Wang, Yixin Shen, Bo Wang, Mingwei Xu, Rui Han, Honghao Liu, Venkat Arun, Hongxin Hu and Xue Wei
    In Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2023), Boston, MA, USA, April 17-19, 2023
    Acceptance rate: 50/272 = 18.3%
  • Return-to-Non-Secure Vulnerabilities on ARM Cortex-M TrustZone: Attack and Defense
    Zheyuan Ma, Xi Tan, Lukasz Ziarek, Ning Zhang, Hongxin Hu and Ziming Zhao
    In Proceedings of the 60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC 2023), San Francisco, CA, USA, July 9-13, 2023
  • Multi-level Distillation of Semantic Knowledge for Pre-training Multilingual Language Model
    Mingqi Li, Fei Ding, Dan Zhang, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu and Feng luo
    In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022), Abu Dhabi, Dec 7-11, 2022
  • Measuring Data Reconstruction Defenses in Collaborative Inference Systems
    Mengda Yang, Juan Wang, Hongxin Hu, Ao Ren, Ziang Li, Xiaoyang Xu and Wenzhe Yi
    In Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), New Orleans, LA, USA, Nov 28 - Dec 9, 2022
    Acceptance rate: 25.6%
  • IMap: Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanning with Programmable Switches [PDF]
    Guanyu Li, Menghao Zhang, Cheng Guo, Han Bao, Mingwei Xu, Hongxin Hu and Fenghua Li
    In Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2022), Renton, WA, USA, April 4-6, 2022
    Acceptance rate: 50/298 = 16.8%
  • SkillDetective: Automated Policy-Violation Detection of Voice Assistant Applications in the Wild [PDF]
    Jeffrey Young, Song Liao, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu and Huixing Deng
    In Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2022), August 10–12, 2022
    Acceptance rate: 256/1492 = 17.2%
  • Understanding and Detecting Remote Infection on Linux-based IoT Devices [PDF]
    Hongda Li, Qiqing Huang, Fei Ding, Hongxin Hu, Long Cheng, Guofei Gu and Ziming Zhao
    In Proceedings of 17th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2022), May 30 - June 3, 2022.
    Acceptance rate: 85/463 = 18.4%
    Best Paper Award
  • Switches are Scanners Too! A Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanner with Programmable Switches [PDF]
    Guanyu Li, Menghao Zhang, Cheng Guo, Han Bao, Mingwei Xu, Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2021), November 10-12, 2021
  • Towards Understanding and Detecting Cyberbullying in Real-world Images [PDF]
    Nishant Vishwamitra, Hongxin Hu, Feng Luo and Long Cheng
    In Proceedings of the 28th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021), February 21-24, 2021.
    Acceptance rate: 87/573 = 15.2%
  • IoTSafe: Enforcing Safety and Security Policy with Real IoT Physical Interaction Discovery [PDF]
    Wenbo Ding, Hongxin Hu and Long Cheng
    In Proceedings of the 28th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021), February 21-24, 2021.
    Acceptance rate: 87/573 = 15.2%
  • Dangerous Skills Got Certified: Measuring the Trustworthiness of Skill Certification in Voice Personal Assistant Platforms [PDF]
    Long Cheng, Christin Wilson, Song Liao, Jeffrey Young, Daniel Dong and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2020), November 9-13, 2020.
    Acceptance rate: 121/715 = 16.9%
  • Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications [PDF]
    Song Liao, Christin Wilson, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu and Huixing Deng
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2020), December 7-11, 2020
    Acceptance rate: 70/302 = 23.2%
    Distinguished Paper Award
  • Interpreting Deep Learning-Based Networking Systems [PDF]
    Zili Meng, Minhu Wang, Jiasong Bai, Mingwei Xu, Hongzi Mao and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM 2020), August 10-14, 2020.
    Acceptance rate: 54/250 = 21.6%
  • Poseidon: Mitigating Volumetric DDoS Attacks with Programmable Switches [PDF]
    Menghao Zhang, Guanyu Li, Shicheng Wang, Chang Liu, Ang Chen, Hongxin Hu, Guofei Gu, Qi Li, Mingwei Xu and Jianping Wu
    In Proceedings of the 27th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2020), San Diego, CA, USA, February 23-26, 2020.
    Acceptance rate: 88/506 = 17.4%
  • Towards A Taxonomy of Content Sensitivity and Sharing Preferences for Photos [PDF]
    Yifang Li, Nishant Vishwamitra, Hongxin Hu and Kelly Caine
    In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, April 25-30, 2020.
    Acceptance rate: 760/3126 = 24.3%
  • SmartChain: Enabling High-Performance Service Chain Partition between SmartNIC and CPU [PDF]
    Shuhe Wang, Zili Meng, Chen Sun, Minhu Wang, Mingwei Xu, Jun Bi, Tong Yang, Qun Huang and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2020), Dublin, Ireland, June 7-11, 2020.
    Best Paper Award
  • On the Safety of IoT Device Physical Interaction Control [PDF]
    Wenbo Ding and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2018), Toronto, Canada, October 15-19, 2018.
    Acceptance rate: 134/809 = 16.6%
  • vNIDS: Towards Elastic Security with Safe and Efficient Virtualization of Network Intrusion Detection Systems [PDF] [PPT]
    Hongda Li, Hongxin Hu, Guofei Gu, Gail-Joon Ahn and Fuqiang Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2018), Toronto, Canada, October 15-19, 2018.
    Acceptance rate: 134/809 = 16.6%
  • Effectiveness and Users' Experience of Obfuscation as a Privacy-Enhancing Technology for Sharing Photos [PDF]
    Yifang Li, Nishant Vishwamitra, Bart P. Knijnenburg, Hongxin Hu and Kelly Caine
    In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2018), Jersey City, NJ, USA, November 3-7, 2018.
    Acceptance rate: 105/384 = 27.3%
  • PAM: When Overloaded, Push Your Neighbor Aside! [PDF]
    Zili Meng, Jun Bi, Chen Sun, Shuhe Wang, Minhu Wang and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Conference on Posters and Demos, Budapest, Hungary, August 20-25, 2018.
    First Place in SIGCOMM 2018 SRC
  • Enhancing Security Education Through Designing SDN Security Labs in CloudLab [PDF]
    Younghee Park, Hongxin Hu, Xiaohong Yuan and Hongda Li
    In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2018), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, February 21-24, 2018.
    Best Paper Award
  • NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV [PDF] [PPT]
    Chen Sun, Jun Bi, Zhilong Zheng, Heng Yu and Hongxin Hu
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM 2017), Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 21-25, 2017.
    Acceptance rate: 36/250 = 14.4%
  • On the Safety and Efficiency of Virtual Firewall Elasticity Control [PDF]
    Juan Deng*, Hongda Li*, Hongxin Hu, Kuang-Ching Wang, Gail-Joon Ahn, Ziming Zhao and Wonkyu Han
    In Proceedings of the 24th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2017), San Diego, CA, USA, February 26 - March 1, 2017 (*co-first author)
    Acceptance rate: 68/423 = 16.1%
Teaching
  • Fall 2024: CSE 565: Computer Security
  • Spring 2024: CSE 569: Network Security
  • Fall 2023: CSE 704 - Seminar: Machine Learning and Cybersecurity
  • Fall 2023: CSE 565: Computer Security
  • Spring 2023: CSE 702 - Seminar: Machine Learning and Cybersecurity
  • Fall 2022: CSE 489/589: Modern Network Concepts
  • Spring 2022: CSE 610 - Special Topic: Security in Emerging Cyber Physical Systems
  • Fall 2021: CSE 489/589: Modern Network Concepts
  • Spring 2021: CSE 707 - Seminar: Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Fall 2020: CPSC 8580 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Spring 2020: CPSC 8570 - Security in Advanced Networking Technologies
  • Fall 2019: CPSC 8580 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Spring 2019: CPSC 8570 - Security in Advanced Networking Technologies
  • Fall 2018: CPSC 8580 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Fall 2018: CPSC-4200/6200 - Computer Security Principles
  • Spring 2018: CPSC 8580 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Fall 2017: CPSC-4200/6200 - Computer Security Principles
  • Spring 2017: CPSC 8570 - Security in Advanced Networking Technologies
  • Fall 2016: CPSC-4200/6200 - Computer Security Principles
  • Fall 2016: CPSC 8580 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
  • Spring 2016: CPSC 8810 - Advanced Networking and Security
  • Fall 2015: CPSC-4200/6200 - Computer Security Principles
  • Spring 2015: CPSC 8810 - Advanced Networking and Security
  • Fall 2014: CPSC 8810 - Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems
Awards and Recognition
  • IEEE Big Data Security Senior Research Award, 2025
  • ACM SACMAT Test-of-Time Award, 2024
  • Outstanding Research Award, UB CSE Department, 2022
  • Best Paper Award, ACM ASIACCS, 2022
  • Amazon Faculty Research Award, 2022
  • Distinguished Paper Award, ACSAC, 2020
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE ICC, 2020
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2019
  • First Place, ACM SIGCOMM SRC, 2018
  • Best Paper Award, ACM SIGCSE, 2018
  • Dean's Faculty Fellows Award, CECAS, Clemson University, 2017
  • Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, ACM SACMAT, 2016
  • Best Paper Award Nominee, IEEE ICNP, 2015
  • Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalist, SCAW, 2015
  • Front Page News, Post and Courier, 2015
  • Third Place, Extreme SDN Innovation Challenge, 2015
  • Best Paper Award, ACM CODASPY, 2014
  • Featured Article, IEEE Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN), 2013
  • Outstanding Ph.D. Student Finalist in Compter Science, ASU, 2012
  • ACSAC Conferenceship Award, ACSAC, 2011
  • Best Paper Award Nominee, ACM SACMAT, 2011
  • IBM PhD Fellowship Nominee, UNCC, 2008
Professional Activities

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Journal Paper Reviewer:

  • ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
  • ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
  • IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
  • IEEE Internet Computing
  • Journal of Computer Security
  • Computers & Security
  • Security and Communication Networks
  • IBM Journal of Research and Development
  • International Journal of Information Security
  • International Journal of Network Management
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Journal of Data & Knowledge Engineering
  • Journal of Biomedical Informatics
  • Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce
  • International Journal of Computer Systems Science and Engineering
  • Security and Communication Networks
  • IET Information Security
  • Wireless Networks
  • Cluster Computing
  • Sensors
  • Journal of Network and Computer Applications
  • Journal of Computer Science and Technology