Biography

Jiahao Cao is an Assistant Research Professor at the Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace (INSC), Tsinghua University. He also serves as the primary leader responsible for security development in the Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI) project in China. Before joining in INSC, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. Degree at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University in 2020 (advised by Professors Mingwei Xu and Qi Li). He was a visiting scholar at George Mason University’s Center for Secure Information Systems (CSIS), funded by a China Scholarship Council (CSC) Scholarship, working with Professor Kun Sun.

He is broadly interested in security research related to networking protocols and systems. He has published many papers in top-tier conferences and journals such as NDSS, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, INFOCOM, TIFS, ToN. Additionally, he has discovered numerous vulnerabilities in various networking systems, many of which have been assigned CVE, CNVD, or CNNVD numbers, affecting a wide range of switches and routers. He was honored with selection for the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program (青年人才托举工程) by the Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE) (2026), the ACM SIGSAC China Doctoral Dissertation Award (2021), the title of Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar (水木学者) (2021), the distinction of Excellent Ph.D. Graduate in the Department of CST at Tsinghua University (2020), and the Best Paper Award at EAI SecureComm 2017.

His current interests mainly focus on the following domains:

• Network Threat Detection (e.g., VPN/Censorship Identification, Malicious Flow Detection, Alert Denoising)
• Network Protocol Security (e.g., RDMA/BGP/RPKI/OpenFlow Vulnerability Discovery through Fuzzing or Manual Analysis)

He is always looking for highly motivated postdocs, students, and research interns to join the group! If you’re interested, feel free to reach out via email (caojh2021@tsinghua.edu.cn).

News

• [TIFS] Sep. 2026, our paper on BGP route origin validation was accepted by IEEE TIFS.
• [CCS’26] August 2026, our paper on unified alert representation was accepted by ACM CCS’26 Posters. Congratulations, Xingyue!
• [ICDM’26] August 2026, our cybersecurity HIN paper was accepted by ICDM’26. Congratulations, Zijing!
• [USENIX Security’27 TPC] July 2026, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for USENIX Security 2027!
• [ACM CCS’26 AEC] May 2026, I was invited to serve on the artifact evaluation committee for ACM CCS 2026!
• [ESORICS’26 TPC] Apr. 2026, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for ESORICS 2026!
• [RAID’26 TPC] Mar. 2026, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for RAID 2026!
• [USENIX VehicleSec’26 TPC] Jan. 2026, I was invited to serve on the Poster/Demo PC of USENIX VehicleSec 2026!
• [NSDI’26] December 2025, our large-scale DDoS Detection paper was accepted by NSDI’26!
• [Computers & Security] December 2025, our geoblocking measurement paper was accepted by Computers & Security. Congratulations, Yuying!
• [USENIX Security’26 AEC] November 2025, I was invited to serve on the artifact evaluation committee for USENIX Security 2026!
• [ACISP’26 Publicity Chair] November 2025, I was invited to serve as the publicity chair for ACISP 2026!
• [NDSS’26] October 2025, our RDMA access control paper was accepted by NDSS’26. Congratulations, Ziteng!
• [ICNP’25] August 2025, our ROV measurement paper was accepted by ICNP’25 Posters and Demos. Congratulations to Zirui, an undergraduate student!
• [TIFS] August 2025, our vulnerable path-guided greybox fuzzing paper was accepted by IEEE TIFS. Congratulations, Zhechao!
• [ICPADS’25 TPC] August 2025, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for ICPADS 2025!
• [ICNP’25] July 2025, our QUIC attack paper was accepted by ICNP’25. Congratulations, Shaorui!
• [SIGCOMM’25] June 2025, our RPKI validator fuzzing paper was accepted by SIGCOMM’25 Posters and Demos. Congratulations to Zizhi, an undergraduate student!
• [ISPA’25 TPC] June 2025, I was invited to serve as the Publicity Chair for ACISP 2026!
• [ACM CCS’25 AEC] May 2025, I was invited to serve on the artifact evaluation committee for ACM CCS 2025!
• [IWQoS’25] May 2025, two papers on heavy hitter detection and geoblocking measurement accepted by IWQoS’25! Congratulations, Xirui and Yuying!
• [APNet’25] Apr. 2025, our ISP de-peering analysis paper accepted by APNet’25. Congratulations, Liming!
• [KSEM’25 TPC] Apr. 2025, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for KSEM 2025!
• [IWQoS’25 TPC] Mar. 2025, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2025!
• [Globecom’25 TPC] Feb. 2025, I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for IEEE Globecom 2025!
• [INFOCOM’25] Dec. 2024, our botnet flow detection paper accpeted by INFOCOM’25. Congratulations, Xuejiao!
• [ToN] Nov. 2024, our SDN covert timing channel paper accepted by ToN! Congratulations, Yixiong!
• [SecureComm’24] Sep. 2024, our semantic-preserving vulnerability detection paper accpeted by SecureComm’24. Congratulations, Weiliang!
• [NDSS’25] Aug. 2024, our smart contract reentrancy detection accepted by NDSS’25. Congratulations, Qiyang!
• [ToN] Aug. 2024, our routing leak detection paper accepted by ToN! Congratulations, Jiang!
• [ICNP’24] Aug. 2024, our RDMA Parameter Optimation paper accepted by ICNP’24! Congratulations, Ziteng!
• [TIFS] Jul. 2024, our TCP traffic obfuscation paper accepted by TIFS! Congratulations, Renjie!