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Phuong Cao
Research Scientist
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Biography
Phuong Cao is a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a TrustedCI Fellow, National Science Foundation (NSF) Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. His research mission is to secure cyberinfrastructure, in particular high performance scientific computing, e.g., Blue Waters supercomputer. He has a broad interest in security, with a multidisciplinary focus on Internet-scale measurements of operational systems, deep measurement driven analytics using probabilistic graphical models, ML/AI-driven honeypot for early attack response, and machine assisted proofs of federated authentication protocols.
Prior to joining NCSA, Phuong has operational experience in the network security industry, including reverse engineering of polymorphic computer viruses, responding to globally distributed denial of service attacks (Akamai’s CDN, LinkedIn), securing the Watson Health Cloud (IBM T.J. Watson Research, zSystems group), and formal verification of smart contracts and OAuth protocols (Microsoft Research, RiSE group). Phuong graduated from Hanoi University of Science and Technology and CS@Illinois.
Resilient and Secure High Performance Computing
HPC-QC and exascale computers
Design of provable and runtime verification techniques for
authentication protocol implementations
Development of honeypot testbed in Science DMZ to proactively
attract novel attacks
Deployment of continuous auditing and attack preemption on
nation’s scientific network backbone traffic
Validation of reliable, secure, and highly available cloud
computing & quantum systems
Current Research
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Hardening critical cyber-physical infrastructure
Security auditing of Jupyter Notebooks; Synthesizing correct implementation of federated and token-based authentication.
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Post Quantum Cryptography Measurement in supercomputers and their applications
Measuring the adoption rate, performance overhead, and novel atacks of PQC in cyber-physical critical infrastructure.
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Sustainable Supercomputing
Decommissioning petascale supercomputers and designing blue prints for recycleable, reusable, resellable exascale supercomputers.
Grants
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FMitF: Bringing Verification-Aware Languages and Federated Authentication to Enable Secure Computing for Scientific Communities
PI: NSF Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF); CISE/CCF Award
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ResiliANT AIOps: Foundation-Model-Driven Resilience for Cloud Computing
Co-PI: IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute
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Mid-Scale RI-1: FABRIC: Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications
Security Engineer
Publications
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Taxonomy of Fingerprinting Techniques for Evaluation of Smart Grid Honeypot Realism
Vanessa Tay, Xinran Li, Daisuke Mashima, Bennet Ng, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K Iyer
IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm), 2023
PDF
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Post-Quantum Cyberinfrastructure Security Readiness: Risks, Measures and Prospects
Phuong Cao, Bach Hoang, Santiago Nunez-Corrales
ASCR Workshop on Basic Research Needs in Quantum Computing and Networking, Department of Energy, (Position Paper), 2023.
PDF
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stealthML: Data-driven Malware for Stealthy Data Exfiltration
Keywhan Chung, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K Iyer
IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience, 2023
PDF
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Predicting ICU Admissions for Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients with a Factor Graph-based Model
Yurui Cao, Phuong Cao, Haotian Chen, Karl M. Kochendorfer, Andrew B. Trotter, William L. Galanter, Paul M. Arnold, Ravishankar K Iyer
AAAI-22 Health Intelligence Workshop
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Investigating Root Causes of Authentication Failures Using a SAML and OIDC Observatory
Jim Basney, Phuong Cao, Terry Fleury
IEEE DependSys 2020
PDF
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Mining Threat Intelligence from Billion-scale SSH Brute-Force Attacks
Yuming Wu, Phuong Cao, Alex Withers, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer
Workshop on Decentralized IoT Systems and Security, co-located with NDSS, 2020
PDF
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On Preempting Advanced Persistent Threats Using Probabilistic Graphical Models
Phuong Cao, Yuming Wu, Subho Banerjee, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer
arXiv/1903.08826
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CAUDIT: Continuous Auditing of SSH-Servers To Mitigate Brute-Force Attacks
Phuong Cao, Yuming Wu, Subho Banerjee, Alex Withers, Justin Azoff, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2019
PDF
 
Talk
 
Press
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SVAuth: A Single-Sign-On Integration Solution with Runtime Verification
Shuo Chen, Matt McCutchen, Phuong Cao, Shaz Qadeer, and Ravishankar Iyer
International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV), 2017
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A Framework for Generation, Replay, and Analysis of Real-World Attack Variants
Phuong Cao, Eric Badger, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer
ACM Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security (HotSOS), 2016
PDF
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Preemptive intrusion detection: theoretical framework and real-world measurements
Phuong Cao, Eric Badger, Adam Slagell, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer
ACM Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security (HotSOS), 2015
PDF
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Security Monitoring for Virtual Machines Using Hardware Architectural Invariants
Cuong Pham, Zachary Estrada, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer
IEEE Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2014
PDF
Magazine articles, workshops, posters, and talks
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An end-to-end security testbed for cyber-attack replay and analysis
Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer
Supercomputing (SC), 2015
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Building Reliable and Secure Virtual Machines Using Architectural Invariants
Cuong Pham, Zachary Estrada, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer
IEEE Security and Privacy (S&P) Magazine, 2014
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Toward a high availability cloud: Techniques and challenges
Cuong Pham, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer
IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2012
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Honors and Awards
Trusted CI Open Science Cybersecurity Fellow, National Science Foundation (NSF) Center of Excellence, 2023
10th place, Salesforce Hackathon (Heroku category), 2014
Best Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2014
Best Use of the APIs, Box.com Hackathon, 2012
Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) Fellowship Nominee, 2011
Teaching
Fall 2021/2022: Guest Lecturer, Designing MPs for ECE 542 / CS 536: Design of Fault Tolerant Digital Systems
Fall 2020: Designing MPs for ECE 598 RKI: Dependable AI Systems
Fall 2019: Teaching Assistant for ECE 542 / CS 536: Design of Fault Tolerant Digital Systems
Spring 2018: Teaching Assistant for CS 461: Computer Security
Fall 2017: Teaching Assistant for CS 461: Computer Security
Spring 2017: Teaching Assistant for ECE 313: Probability and Statistics