Phuong Cao

Research Scientist
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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

  1. Design of provable and runtime verification techniques for authentication protocol implementations

  2. Development of honeypot testbed in Science DMZ to proactively attract novel attacks

  3. Deployment of continuous auditing and attack preemption on nation’s scientific network backbone traffic

  4. Validation of reliable, secure, and highly available cloud computing & quantum systems

Current Research

Grants

Publications

Magazine articles, workshops, posters, and talks

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

    Media and Press