Publications

Group highlights

(The following are our research highlights. For a full publication list, please visit DBLP)

Internet Security & Privacy and Architectural Innovations

  • Readily deployable and proactive DDoS prevention systems: CCS’16, ToN’18, TIFS’18, U.S. National NSF I-Corps Award.
  • Privacy Preserving access control for Tor Networks: ICNP’17. Acknowledge by the Tor Project and Cloudflare Inc.
  • Internet Source and Path Authentication: IWQoS’18.
Blockchain Infrastructures and Web3.0 Initiatives

  • Pioneering work in Blockchain Interoperability and Web3.0 definitions: CCS’19, TDSC’21, Invited Talks @ IEEE Blockchain Standards, Ant Group, IC3, etc.
  • Blockchain-empowered application innovations: IEEE Network’20, ICDCS’19.
Datacenter Networking and Infrastructures

  • World’s first production-grade SDN control-plane: NDSI’21 (Special acknowledgement), Google Feats of Engineering Award for High Network Availability.
  • World’s first production-grade automated management plane: leading author and under review, Google Feats of Engineering Award for WAN Capacity Augment.
  • Managing multi-tenancy and routing control in public Cloud: INFOCOM’18, TPDS’19, TPDS’21, One U.S. Patent, Product adoption by NEC, Acknowledgement by Huawei and Google.
Systems and ML Security

  • Vulnerability discovery for large-scale RPC systems: ASIACCS’21, Adoption by Ant Group.
  • Advanced Persistent Threat: CCS’19, Security'22
  • Adversarial attack against Graph Neural Networks: CCS’21.
  • Searchable Symmetric Encryption: TIFS’20.
  • IoT Security: Security’22.

Selected Publications

CoGNN: Towards Secure and Efficient Collaborative Graph Learning
Zhenhua Zou, Zhuotao Liu, Jinyong Shan, Qi Li, Ke Xu, Mingwei Xu
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2024

Brain-on-Switch: Towards Advanced Intelligent Network Dataplane via NN-Driven Traffic Analysis at Line-Speed
Jinzhu Yan, Haotian Xu, Zhuotao Liu, Qi Li, Ke Xu, Mingwei Xu, Jianping Wu
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2024
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Pencil: Private and Extensible Collaborative Learning without the Non-Colluding Assumption
Xuanqi Liu, Zhuotao Liu, Qi Li, Ke Xu, Mingwei Xu
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Learning with Semantics: Towards a Semantics-Aware Routing Anomaly Detection System
Yihao Chen, Qilei Yin, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Ke Xu, Yi Xu, Mingwei Xu, Ziqian Liu, Jianping Wu
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2024
[pdf]

Defending Against Data Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Learning: An Information Theory Approach
Qi Tan, Qi Li, Yi Zhao, Zhuotao Liu, Xiaobing Guo, Ke Xu
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2024
[pdf]

martFL: Enabling Utility-Driven Data Marketplace with a Robust and Verifiable Federated Learning Architecture
Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Qi Li, Ke Xu
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2023
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Learning from Limited Heterogeneous Training Data: Meta-Learning for Unsupervised Zero-day Web Attack Detection across Web Domains
Peiyang Li, Ye Wang, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Ke Xu, Ju Ren, Zhiying Liu, Ruilin Lin
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

Low-Quality Training Data Only? A Robust Framework for Detecting Encrypted Malicious Network Traffic
Yuqi Qing, Qilei Yin, Xinhao Deng, Yihao Chen, Zhuotao Liu, Kun Sun, Ke Xu, Jia Zhang, Qi Li
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024
[pdf] [doi]

Cross Container Attacks: The Bewildered eBPF on Clouds
Yi He, Roland Guo, Yunlong Xing, Xijia Che, Kun Sun, Zhuotao Liu, Ke Xu, Qi Li
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

LLMs Can Understand Encrypted Prompt: Towards Privacy-Computing Friendly Transformers
Xuanqi Liu, Zhuotao Liu
[pdf] [doi]

iSyn: Semi-Automated Smart Contract Synthesis from Legal Financial Agreements
Pengcheng Fang, Zhenhua Zou, Xusheng Xiao, Zhuotao Liu
ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

Change Management in Physical Network Lifecycle Automation
Mohammad Al-Fares, Virginia Beauregard, Kevin Grant, Angus Griffith, Quan Leng, Alexander Lin, Zhuotao Liu, Bill Martinusen, Nikil Mehta, Jeffrey Mogul, Andrew Narver, Anshul Nigham, Sean Smith, Amin Vahdat
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

Robust Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting Attacks in the Wild
Xinhao Deng, Qilei Yin, Zhuotao Liu, Xiyuan Zhao, Qi Li, Mingwei Xu, Ke Xu, Jianping Wu
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

Provenance of Training without Training Data: Towards Privacy-Preserving DNN Model Ownership Verification
Yunpeng Liu, Kexin Li, Zhuotao Liu, Bihan Wen, Ke Xu, Weiqiang Wang, Wenbiao Zhao, Qi Li
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

An Efficient Design of Intelligent Network Data Plane
Guangmeng Zhou, Zhuotao Liu, Chuanpu Fu, Qi Li, Ke Xu
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2023
[pdf] [doi]

FlowTele: Remotely Shaping Traffic on Internet-Scale Networks
Bo-Rong Chen; Zhuotao Liu; Jinhui Song, Fanhui Zeng, Zhoushi Zhu, Siva Phani Keshav Bachu, Yih-Chun Hu
ACM CoNext 2022
[pdf] [doi]

RapidPatch: Firmware Hotpatching for Real-Time Embedded Devices
Yi He, Zhenhua Zou, Kun Sun, Zhuotao Liu, Ke Xu, Qian Wang, Chao Shen, Zhi Wang, Qi Li
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2022
[pdf] [doi]

Unsupervised Contextual Anomaly Detection for Database Systems
Sainan Li, Qilei Yin, Guoliang Li, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Jinwei Zhu
ACM SIGMOD 2022
[pdf] [doi]

Dynamic Network Security Function Enforcement via Joint Flow and Function Scheduling
Qi Li, Xinhao Deng, Zhuotao Liu, Yuan Yang, Xiaoyue Zou, Qian Wang, Mingwei Xu, Jianping Wu
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) 2022
[doi]

Back-Propagating System Dependency Impact for Attack Investigation
Pengcheng Fang, Peng Gao, Changlin Liu, Erman Ayday, Kangkook Jee, Ting Wang, Tanfang (Fanny) Ye, Zhuotao Liu, Xusheng Xiao
USENIX Security Symposium (Security) 2022
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Automated Multi-Tab Website Fingerprinting Attack
Qilei Yin, Zhuotao Liu, Qi Li, Tao Wang, Qian Wang, Chao Shen, Yixiao Xu
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) 2022
[doi]

Make Web3.0 Connected
Zhuotao Liu, Yangxi Xiang, Jian Shi, Peng Gao, Haoyu Wang, Xusheng Xiao, Bihan Wen, Qi Li, Yih-Chun Hu
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) 2022
[pdf] [doi] [code]

On Detecting Growing-Up Behaviors of Malicious Accounts in Privacy-Centric Mobile Social Networks
Zijie Yang, Binghui Wang, Haoran Li, Dong Yuan, Zhuotao Liu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Chang Liu, Qi Li, Xiao Liang, Shaofeng Hu
ACM Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2021
[pdf] [doi]

A Hard Label Black-box Adversarial Attack Against Graph Neural Networks
Jiaming Mu, Binghui Wang, Qi Li, Kun Sun, Mingwei Xu, Zhuotao Liu
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2021
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Efficient Forwarding Anomaly Detection in Software-Defined Networks
Qi Li, Yunpeng Liu, Zhuotao Liu, Peng Zhang, Chunhui Pang
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) 2021
[doi] [code]

Privilege-Escalation Vulnerability Discovery for Large-scale RPC Services: Principle, Design, and Deployment
Zhuotao Liu, Hao Zhao, Sainan Li, Qi Li, Tao Wei, Yu Wang
ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Asia CCS) 2021
[pdf] [doi] [slides]

SAP-SSE: Protecting Search Patterns and Access Patterns in Searchable Symmetric Encryption
Qiyang Song, Zhuotao Liu, Jiahao Cao, Kun Sun, Qi Li, Cong Wang
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) 2020
[pdf] [doi]

Toward Blockchain-Powered Trusted Collaborative Services for Edge-Centric Networks
Bo Wu, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Shoushou Ren, Zhuotao Liu, Zhichao Zhang
IEEE Network 2020
[pdf] [doi]

HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains
Zhuotao Liu, Yangxi Xiang, Jian Shi, Peng Gao, Haoyu Wang, Xusheng Xiao, Bihan Wen, Yih-Chun Hu
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2019
[pdf] [doi] [slides] [code]

DeepIntent: Deep Icon-Behavior Learning for Detecting Intention-Behavior Discrepancy in Mobile Apps
Shengqu Xi, Shao Yang, Xusheng Xiao, Yuan Yao, Yayuan Xiong, Fengyuan Xu, Haoyu Wang, Peng Gao, Zhuotao Liu, Feng Xu, Jian Lu
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2019
[doi] [code]

Managing Recurrent Virtual Network Updates in Multi-Tenant Datacenters: A System Perspective
Zhuotao Liu, Yuan Cao, Xuewu Zhang, Changping Zhu, Fan Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) (2019)
[pdf] [doi] [patent]

SmartCrowd: Decentralized and Automated Incentives for Distributed IoT System Detection
Bo Wu, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Yih-Chun Hu, Zhichao Zhang, Xinle Du, Bingyang Liu, Shoushou Ren
IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2019
[pdf] [doi]

Umbrella: Enabling ISPs to Offer Readily Deployable and Privacy-Preserving DDoS Prevention Services
Zhuotao Liu, Yuan Cao, Min Zhu, Wei Ge
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) 2018
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Practical Proactive DDoS-Attack Mitigation via Endpoint-Driven In-Network Traffic Control
Zhuotao Liu, Hao Jin, Yih-Chun Hu, Michael Bailey
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) 2018
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Enabling Work-Conserving Bandwidth Guarantees for Multi-Tenant Datacenters via Dynamic Tenant-Queue Binding
Zhuotao Liu, Kai Chen, Haitao Wu, Shuihai Hu, Yih-Chun Hu, Yi Wang, Gong Zhang
IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2018
[pdf] [doi]

Enabling Efficient Source and Path Verification via Probabilistic Packet Marking
Bo Wu, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Zhuotao Liu, Yih-Chun Hu, Martin J. Reed, Meng Shen, Fan Yang
IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS) 2018
[doi]

TorPolice: Towards Enforcing Service-defined Access Policies for Anonymous Communication in the Tor Network
Zhuotao Liu, Yushan Liu, Philipp Winter, Prateek Mittal, Yih-Chun Hu
IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) 2017
[pdf] [doi]

MiddlePolice: Toward Enforcing Destination-Defined Policies in the Middle of the Internet
Zhuotao Liu, Hao Jin, Yih-Chun Hu, Michael Bailey
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2016
[pdf] [doi] [code]