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
Email: hongxinh@buffalo.edu
Photo: Hongxin Hu
Quick Links: [ Research | Publications | Teams | Teaching | Awards | Services ]

RA position is available: I am looking for self-motivated students, who have strong interests in computer security, networking or machine learning. If you are interested, please send me an email with your CV.

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 (2019) and Amazon Research Award (2022). My research spans security and networking. 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 (NeurIPS and ICML), and human-computer interaction (CHI and CSCW). My research has been funded by NSF (SaTC, CNS, IIS, OAC, SOC, etc.), NSA, USDOT, VMware, Amazon, Google, Dell, etc. I am the recipient of 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
  • 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 Model Inversion Defences in Edge–Cloud 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.
  • 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.
Research Interests
Selected and Recent Publications [Google Scholar] [All Publications]
  • xNIDS: Explaining Deep Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems for Active Intrusion Responses
    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

  • 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%
  • Measuring Model Inversion Defences in Edge–Cloud 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

Associate Editor:

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Poster Chair:

Proceedings Chair:

Workshop Chair:

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Session Chair:

Web Chair:

Technical Program Committee:

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