Hongxin Hu - University at Buffalo

Hongxin Hu
Associate Professor

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

Office: 311 Davis Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-4733
Email: hongxinh@buffalo.edu

Short Bio (CV)

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Previously, I was an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and the Director of Cybersecurity Center at Clemson University. I am a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for 2019. 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 (CCS, USENIX Security, and NDSS), networking (SIGCOMM and NSDI), machine learning (ICML), and human-computer interaction (CHI and CSCW). My research has been funded by NSF (SaTC, CNS, IIS, OAC, SOC, and DGE), USDOT, VMware, Google, Amazon, Dell, etc. I am the recipient of the Best Paper Awards from ACSAC 2020, IEEE ICC 2020, ACM SIGCSE 2018, and ACM CODASPY 2014, and the Best Paper Award Honorable Mentions from ACM SACMAT 2016, IEEE ICNP 2015, and ACM SACMAT 2011. 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

12/2021 [Paper]: Our paper "IMap: Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanning with Programmable Switches" has been accepted to NSDI 2022.
09/2021 [Paper]: Our paper "SkillDetective: Automated Policy-Violation Detection of Voice Assistant Applications in the Wild" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2022.
08/2021 [Paper]: Our paper "Switches are Scanners Too! A Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanner with Programmable Switches" has been accepted to HotNets 2021.
08/2021 [Competition]: Our team Cacti placed 5th in Baidu AutoDriving CTF 2021.
05/2021 [Paper]: Our paper "CARTL: Cooperative Adversarially-Robust Transfer Learning" has been accepted to ICML 2021 for long presentation (top 3%).
12/2020 [Paper]: Two papers have been accepted to NDSS 2021. One paper introduces our soluton for understanding and detecting cyberbullying in real-world images. The other paper proposes IoTSafe for safety and security policy enforcement with real IoT physical interaction discovery. Both papers are first-authored by my Ph.D. students.
12/2020 [Distinguished Paper Award]: Our paper "Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications" won the Distinguished Paper Award at ACSAC 2020.
09/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Dangerous Skills Got Certified: Measuring the Trustworthiness of Skill Certification in Voice Personal Assistant Platforms" has been accepted to CCS 2020.
07/2020 [News]: Our work on the trustworthiness measurement of Alexa's skills certification has been featured on The Register, Washington Internet Daily, and ZDNet, etc.
05/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Interpreting Deep Learning-Based Networking Systems" has been accepted to SIGCOMM 2020.
05/2020 [Best Paper Award]: Our paper "SmartChain: Enabling High-Performance Service Chain Partition between SmartNIC and CPU" won the Best Paper Award at ICC 2020.
01/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Poseidon: Mitigating Volumetric DDoS Attacks with Programmable Switches" has been accepted to NDSS 2020.
More news...

Research Interests

Emerging Network Technologies and Security (NFV, SDN, 5G/Next-G, Edge, etc.)

IMap [NSDI'22], Poseidon [NDSS'20], Martini [ICNP'20], Octans [INFOCOM'19], PiTree [MM'19], vNIDS [CCS'18], Grus [ICNP'18], PAM [SIGCOMM'18 SRC], VFW Controller [NDSS'17], NFP [SIGCOMM'17], SDPA [ICNP'15], FlowGuard [HotSDN'14], etc.

Security and Privacy in IoT and CPS

SkillDetective [USENIX Security'22], IoTSafe [NDSS'21], VPASec [CCS'20], VPAPri [ACSAC'20], DeepPower [ASIACCS'20], IoTMon [CCS'18], etc.

Machine Learning for Security, Privacy, and Networking

CARTL [ICML'21], BullyDefender [NDSS'21], Metis [SIGCOMM'20], DeepPower [ASIACCS'20], CrescendoNet [ICMLA'18], PCNN [ICMLA'16], etc.

Security and Privacy in Social Networks (Cyberbullying, Hate Speech, Image Privacy, etc. )

BullyDefender [NDSS'21], Taxonomy [CHI'20], PETSP [CSCW'18], PMAC [SACMAT'17], GTA [SACMAT'14], SocialImpact [ESORICS'12], Retinue [ACSAC'11], etc.

Usable Privacy and Security

Taxonomy [CHI'20], PETSP [CSCW'18], PGA [USENIX Security'13], etc.

Security in Cloud and Mobile Computing

Morpheus [ACSAC'14], RiskMon [CODASPY'14], CBE [CODASPY'12], CRBAC [ASIACCS'10], DR@FT [ESORICS'10], etc.

Selected and Recent Publications [Google Scholar] [All Publications]

IMap: Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanning with Programmable Switches
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 = 17.4%

SkillDetective: Automated Policy-Violation Detection of Voice Assistant Applications in the Wild
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

Switches are Scanners Too! A Fast and Scalable In-Network Scanner with Programmable Switches
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

CARTL: Cooperative Adversarially-Robust Transfer Learning [PDF]
Dian Chen, Hongxin Hu, Qian Wang, Yinli Li, Cong Wang, Chao Shen and Qi Li
In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2021), July 18-24, 2021.
Long presentation, top 3% (166/5513)

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 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

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
NSF Travel Grant, NSF CAREER Workshop, 2013
Outstanding Ph.D. Student Finalist in Compter Science, ASU, 2012
ACSAC Conferenceship Award, ACSAC, 2011
Best Paper Award Nominee, ACM SACMAT, 2011
Applied Security Research Best Paper Award Nominee, CSAW AT&T, 2011
IBM PhD Fellowship Nominee, UNCC, 2008

Professional Activities

Associate Editor:

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). 2020 - Present
Computers & Security (COSE). 2020 - Present
Cybersecurity & Privacy. Frontiers in Big Data, 2018 - Present

Guest Editor:

Special Issue of Network Traffic Analytics in the Era of AI and SDN. Computer Networks, 2021
Special Issue of Security in Emerging Networking Technologies. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2017/2018
Special Issue of Advances in Steganography and Multimedia Security for Big Data. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (IJDSN), 2019
Special Issue of NFV Technologies. China Communications, 2018
Special Issue of Adaptive Mobile Crowd Sensing Security for BYOD Convergence in Mobile Creative Research. Mobile Information System, 2016
Special Issue of Security & Privacy Mechanisms for Sensor Middleware and Application in Internet of Things (IoT). International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2015
Special Issue of TrustCol2014. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Collaborative Computing, 2015

Program Chair:

TPC Co-Chair (SDN/NFV Track): International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2021
TPC Co-Chair: ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization (SDN-NFV Security), 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
TPC Co-Chair: IEEE International Workshop on Trusted Collaboration (TrustCol), 2014, 2015, 2016
TPC Co-Chair: IEEE International Workshop Big Data Security and Services (BigDataService), 2017, 2018

Poster Chair:

ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Proceedings Chair:

ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2017
ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Publicity Chair:

ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), 2015

Session Chair:

ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2018
ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), 2017
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2014
IEEE International Workshop on Trusted Collaboration (TrustCol), 2011

Web Chair:

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2014

Technical Program Committee:

The Web Conference (WWW), 2019, 2021, 2022
The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022
ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2018, 2021, 2022
ACM Symposium on Access ControlModels and Technologies (SACMAT), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Internet of Things (IoT) track, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), 2020
IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), 2021
IFIP Networking Conference (NETWORKING), 2019, 2020
IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS), 2018
International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2017, 2018, 2019
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Security in Softwarized Networks: Prospects and Challenges (SecSoN), 2018
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet of Things Security and Privacy (IoT S&P), 2018
IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Smart Systems (MASS), 2019
IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), 2018
ACM CCS Workshop on Internet of Things Security and Privacy (IoT S&P), 2017
ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Privacy and Security (MPS), 2017, 2018
IEEE INFOCOM CrossCloud Workshop (CrossCloud), 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018
IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), 2016
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2015
IEEE International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing (ATC), 2016, 2017
International Conference on Computing and Network Communications (CoCoNet), 2015
Workshop on Action Languages, Process Modeling, and Policy Reasoning (ALPP), 2015
IEEE ICNP CoolSDN Workshop (CoolSDN), 2014, 2015, 2016
International Workshop on Access Control Policies, Models and Mechanisms (ACPM), 2014
IEEE International Workshop on Trusted Collaboration (TrustCol), 2013
International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security (CSS), 2013
International Conference on Mobile, Ubiquitous, and Intelligent Computing (MUSIC), 2013
FTRA International Symposium on Advances in Cryptography, Security and Applications for Future Computing (ACSA-Summer), 2012

Conference Paper Reviewer:

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2005-2007, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2018
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018
ACM Symposium on Access Control Models And Technologies (SACMAT), 2005- 2013
ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), 2011 - 2013
International World Wide Web Conferences (WWW)--Security and Privacy Track, 2009-2011
ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC)--Computer Security Track. 2006-2011
ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), 2006-2008

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