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 "Towards LLM-Assisted Vulnerability Detection and Repair for Open-Source 5G UE Implementations" has been accepted to FutureG 2025.

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 [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.

12/2022 [Award]: I received UB CSE Outstanding Research Award.

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. Our paper introduces our soluton for understanding and detecting cyberbullying in real-world images. The other paper proposes IoTSafe to support the enforcemtn of safety and security policy 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.

09/2020 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committees of AAAI 2021.

08/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications" has been accepted to ACSAC 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.

07/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Martini: Bridging the Gap between Network Measurement and Control Using Switching ASICs" has been accepted to ICNP 2020.

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.

02/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "DeepPower: Non-intrusive Detection of IoT Malware using Power Side Channels" has been accepted to ASIACCS 2020.

02/2020 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committees of WiSec 2020 and ACSAC 2020.

01/2020 [Paper]: Our paper "Poseidon: Enabling Cost-efficient and Agile DDoS Defense with Programmable Switches" has been accepted to NDSS 2020.

12/2019 [Paper]: Our paper "Towards A Taxonomy of Content Sensitivity and Sharing Preferences for Photos" has been accepted to CHI 2020.

10/2019 [Report]: I contributed to an NSF technical report "Programmable System Security in a Software-Defined World: Research Challenges and Opportunities".

07/2019 [Paper]: Our paper "PiTree: Practical Implementation of ABR Algorithms Using Decision Trees" has been accepted to Multimedia 2019.

05/2019 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committee of  ASIACCS 2020.

03/2019 [Award]: Congrats to my Ph.D. student Hongda Li for receiving an award for Outstanding Ph.D. Student in Computer Science.

01/2019 [Award]: I have received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award for our work on network security function virtualization. This research has been featured on Clemson CECAS News.

03/2019 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committee of  ACSAC 2019.

02/2019 [Award]: Congrats to my Ph.D. student Hongda Li for receiving Outstanding Ph.D. Student in Computer Science award.

11/2018 [Paper]: Our paper "Octans: Optimal Placement of Service Function Chains in Many-Core Systems" has been accepted to INFOCOM 2019.

10/2018 [Workshop]: Please consider submitting your work on SDN and NFV security to SDN-NFV Security 2019.

9/2018 [Award]: Congrats to my Ph.D. students Hongda Li and Nishant Vishwamitra for receiving the Talford Annual Fellowship awards.

08/2018 [Competition]: Our work PAM won the First Place in SIGCOMM 2018 Student Research Competition (SRC).

07/2018 [Paper]: Two papers have been accepted to CCS 2018. One paper presents IoTMon to support the safe control of IoT device interactions. The other paper proposes vNIDS to enable the safe and efficient virtualization of NIDSes. Both papers are first-authored by my Ph.D. students. They have been featured on Clemson CECAS News.

7/2018 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committee of  WWW 2019.

3/2018 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committee of  ACSAC 2018.

01/2018 [Best Paper Award]: Our paper "Enhancing Security Education Through Designing SDN Security Labs in CloudLab" was selected as one of the best papers for SIGCSE 2018.

10/2017 [Workshop]: Please consider submiting your work on SDN and NFV security to SDN-NFV Security 2018.

08/2017 [Paper]: Our paper "Effectiveness and Users' Experience of Obfuscation as a Privacy-Enhancing Technology for Sharing Photos" has been accepted to CSCW 2018.

08/2017 [News]: Our S2OS project has been featured on Clemson CECAS News and also highlighted on ACM TechNews.

8/2017 [PC Member]: I was invited to serve on the program committee of  ASIACCS 2018.

07/2017 [Paper]: Our paper "HYPER: A Hybrid High-Performance Framework for Network Function Virtualization" has been accepted to IEEE JSAC.

07/2017 [Paper]: Our paper "SDPA: Towards a Stateful Data Plane in Software-Defined Networking" has been accepted to IEEE/ACM TON.

05/2017 [Paper]: Our paper "NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV" has been accepted to SIGCOMM 2017.

03/2017 [Talk]: I was invited to give a talk on NFV Security at NFV World Congress.

01/2017 [Award]: I received CECAS Dean's Faculty Fellows Award.

10/2016 [Paper]: Our paper "On the Safety and Efficiency of Virtual Firewall Elasticity Control" has been accepted to NDSS 2017. (Featured on Clemson CECAS News）

09/2016 [Panel]: I was invited to serve on the SDN Security panel at IEEE CNS 2016.

09/2016 [Workshop]: Please consider submitting your work on SDN and NFV security to SDN-NFV Security 2017.

06/2016 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]: Our paper "Enabling Dynamic Access Control for Controller Applications in Software-Defined Networks" received the Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at SACMAT 2016.

04/2016 [Talk]: I was invited to give a talk on NFV-enabled Security Mechanism at NFV World Congress.

04/2016 [Paper]: Our paper "HetSDN: Exploiting SDN for Intelligent Network Usage in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks" has been accepted to IWQoS 2016.

04/2016 [Paper]: Our paper "Enabling Dynamic Access Control for Controller Applications in Software-Defined Networks" has been accepted to SACMAT 2016.

04/2016 [Paper]: Our paper "State-aware Network Access Management for Software-Defined Networks" has been accepted to SACMAT 2016.

11/2015 [Best Paper Nominee]: Our paper "SDPA: Enhancing Stateful Forwarding for Software-Defined Networking" has been nominated for Best Paper Award at ICNP 2015.

10/2015 [Paper/Award]: Our paper "Morpheus: Automatically Generating Heuristics to Detect Android Emulators" has been selected as one of the top-10 Finalists for CSAW 2015 Best Applied Security Paper Award (CSAW 2015 Research).

10/2015 [Workshop]: Please consider submiting your work on SDN and NFV security to SDN-NFV Security'16, which is in conjunction with ACM CODASPY'16.

10/2015 [Spotlight Paper]: Our paper "Towards Automated Risk Assessment and Mitigation of Mobile Applications" has been selected as the Spotlight Paper for the September/October 2015 issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

09/2015 [Paper]: Our paper "VNGuard: An NFV/SDN Combination Framework for Provisioning and Managing Virtual Firewalls" has been accepted to NFV-SDN 2015.

09/2015 [Frontpage News]: Our anti-cyberbullying research made the front page of the Post and Courier.

08/2015 [News Coverage]: Our research on the Visual Cyberbullying Defense has been reported by Clemson News, Clemson TV, Independent Mail, The Post and Courier, Greenville (SC) News, WSPA-TV, WHNS-TV, WLOS, WYFF4, etc.

06/2015 [Paper]: Our paper "SDPA: Enhancing Stateful Forwarding for Software-Defined Networking" has been accepted to ICNP 2015.

06/2015 [Competition]: Our team "FLOWGUARD" won third place in the first annual Extreme SDN Innovation Challenge.

03/2015 [Paper]: Our paper "Supporting Virtualized Network Functions with Stateful Data Plane Abstraction" has been accepted to IEEE NETWORK.

01/2015 [Paper]: Our paper "Picture Gesture Authentication: Empirical Analysis, Automated Attacks, and Scheme Evaluation" has been accepted to ACM TISSEC.

11/2014 [Guest Editor]: I was invited as a Guest Editor for the special issue on Security & Privacy Mechanisms for Sensor Middleware and Application in Internet of Things (IoT) for IJDSN.

09/2014 [Grant]: Dell awarded our research project on Network Function Virtualization.

09/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "Towards Automated Risk Assessment and Mitigation of Mobile Application" has been accepted to IEEE TDSC.

08/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "Morpheus: Automatically Generating Heuristics to Detect Android Emulators" has been accepted to ACSAC 2014.

04/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "FlowGuard: Building Robust Firewalls for Software-Defined Networks" has been accepted as a full paper with a long presentation by ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking - HotSDN 2014.

04/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "Game Theoretic Analysis of Multiparty Access Control in Online Social Networks" has been accepted to ACM SACMAT 2014.

04/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "LPM: Layered Policy Management for Software-Defined Networks" has been accepted to DBSec 2014.

03/2014 [Best Paper Award]: Our paper "RiskMon: Continuous and Automated Risk Assessment of Mobile Applications" won the Best Paper Award at ACM CODASPY 2014.

02/2014 [Paper]: Our paper "Towards a Reliable SDN Firewall" has been accepted by Open Networking Summit 2014 Research Track.

01/2014 [Spotlight Paper]: Our paper "Discovery and Resolution of Anomalies in Web Access Control Policies" has been selected as the Spotlight Paper for the November/December 2013 issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

09/2013 [Paper]: Our paper "RiskMon: Continuous and Automated Risk Assessment of Mobile Applications" has been accepted as a full paper to ACM CODASPY 2014.

08/2013 [Paper]: Our paper "Role-Based Cryptosystem: A New Cryptographic RBAC System Based on Role-Key Hierarchy" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS).

08/2013 [Media Coverage]: Our research on the Security of Windows 8 Picture Passwords has been reported by ACM TechNews, InformationWeek, WeLiveSecurity, NetworkWorld, SlashDot, TechEYE, ThreatPost, SoftPedia, TechRadar, TechJournal, TechDigest, ParityNews, NeoWin, WebRoot, NakedSecurity, SignalNetworks, MyPRGenie, TheRegister, cnBeta, Delaware Business Daily, The State Press, DSU News, etc.

07/2013 [Competition]: Our team "My Little Pwnies" (60% of female members) won the Delaware U.S. Cyber Challenge Competition. (DSU News, USCC News)

07/2013 [Invited Talk]: I was invited to give a talk on "Securing Software-Defined Networks" at the Faculty Workshop on Secure Software Engineering & Computer Science Retention sponsored by the U.S Department of Education.

06/2013 [Featured Paper]: Our TKDE paper "Multiparty Access Control for Online Social Networks: Model and Mechanisms" has been featured by the IEEE Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN). (Respective Post)

04/2013 [Paper]: Our paper "On the Security of Picture Gesture Authentication" has been accepted to USENIX Security 2013.

03/2013 [Certification]: I provided the initiative and leadership to develop the Cyber Security certificate program at DSU. This program has received the Information Assurance Courseware Evaluation (IACE) Program Certificate from NSA. (Formal Certification, Approval Letter, DSU News, CIS News)