CAO Jiahao

Title: Assistant Research Professor

Email: caojh2021@tsinghua.edu.cn

Personal Website: https://caojh15.github.io/

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China, 2020
B.Eng. in Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, 2015

Network security, including network traffic analysis, routing security, and threat detection.

Jiahao Cao has long been engaged in research on network security, primarily focusing on threat detection, traffic analysis, and routing security. He has published over 30 papers in top-tier conferences and journals in networking and security, such as USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), all recognized as CCF-A venues.
He has received several honors and awards, including:
• 2021 ACM SIGSAC China Rising Star Award (only two recipients nationwide)
• 2021 Tsinghua University "Shuimu Scholar"
• USENIX Association Student Travel Grant
• EAI SecureComm Best Paper Award (first time awarded to a mainland Chinese institution as the first affiliation)

Recent Research Focus

1. Network Traffic Analysis:
Leveraging artificial intelligence and high-performance networking technologies to analyze massive internet traffic efficiently and accurately, with applications such as malicious traffic detection and host fingerprint tracking.

2. Internet Routing Security:
Addressing inter-domain routing threats such as hijacking and leaks through data-driven detection methods and the design of novel secure routing architectures.

3. Network Threat Discovery:
Discovering the security threats and attack surfaces inherent in network architectures and protocols, and developing effective defense strategies accordingly.

[1] Jiahao Cao, Mingwei Xu, Qi Li, Kun Sun, and Yuan Yang. The LOFT Attack: Overflowing SDN Flow Tables at a Low Rate. In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2023.

[2] Renjie Xie, Jiahao Cao, Enhuan Dong, Mingwei Xu, Kun Sun, Qi Li, Licheng Shen, and Menghao Zhang. Rosetta: Enabling Robust TLS Encrypted Traffic Classification in Diverse Network Environments with TCP-Aware Traffic Augmentation. In Proc. of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), Anaheim, CA, USA, August，2023.

[3] Renjie Xie, Jiahao Cao, Qi Li, Kun Sun, Guofei Gu, Mingwei Xu, and Yuan Yang. Disrupting the SDN Control Channel via Shared Links: Attacks and Countermeasures. In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 2158-2172, 2022.

[4] Zijie Yang, Jiahao Cao, Zhuotao Liu, Xiaoli Zhang, Kun Sun and Qi Li. Good Learning, Bad Performance: A Novel Attack against RL-based Congestion Control Systems. In IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS), vol. 17, pp. 1069-1082, 2022.

[5] Xu He, Jiahao Cao, Shu Wang, Kun Sun, Lisong Xu and Qi Li. Auter: Automatically Tuning Multi-layer Network Buffers in Long-Distance Shadowsocks Networks. IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Virtual Conference, May, 2022.

[6] Jiahao Cao, Renjie Xie, Kun Sun, Qi Li, Guofei Gu, and Mingwei Xu. When Match Fields Do Not Need to Match: Buffered Packets Hijacking in SDN. In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, USA, February，2020.

[7] Jiahao Cao, Qi Li, Renjie Xie, Kun Sun, Guofei Gu, Mingwei Xu, and Yuan Yang. The CrossPath Attack: Disrupting the SDN Control Channel via Shared Links. In Proc. of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), Santa Clara, CA, USA, August, 2019.

[8] Shu Wang, Jiahao Cao, Xu He, Kun Sun, and Qi Li. When the Differences in Frequency Domain are Compensated: Understanding and Defeating Modulated Replay Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Orlando, USA, November, 2020.