Phuong M. Cao
Research ScientistNational Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Phuong M. Cao is a cybersecurity researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work focuses on securing high-performance computing (HPC) cyberinfrastructure against accidental failures and intentional cyberattacks. His research is driven by network traffic measurements, cyberattack detection using probabilistic models, and formal verification of authentication protocols. As a National Science Foundation Trusted CI Fellow, he provides security expertise to research and education partners, including the FABRIC testbed. He has received awards for his research and mentorship, including a Best Paper Award, a Best Hackathon Award, and recognition as an Outstanding Mentor for Fiddler Innovation Fellowship recipients. He was born in Phu Tho, Vietnam and currently a U.S. Permanent Resident (EB1).
(Name and Biography)
Research Summary: Building resilient and secure supercomputers to advance open-science research in the presence of accidental failures and intentional cyber-attacks.
News
- 2024/09: NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure has awarded our proposal on "Quantum-Resistant Cryptography in Supercomputing Scientific Applications"!
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2024/07:
IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE) accepted paper on Post Quantum Cryptography.
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Network Instrument: Measuring PQC Adoption Rates and Identifying Migration Pathways, with Jakub Sowa et al. -
2024/06:
USENIX Security paper
on SOC Network Alerts
True Attacks, Attack Attempts, or Benign Triggers?, with Limin et al. -
2024/06:
ARRAY workshop at PLDI
The Landscape of Formal Verification in APL: a Review with a Case Study in Quantum Computing, 2024 -
2024/04:
Workshop on Dependability Challenges in Hybrid Classical-Quantum Computing
Systems
IEEE Quantum Week 2024 -
2023/03:
Trusted CI Fellow
NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, 2023
Publications
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Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Network Instrument:
Measuring PQC Adoption Rates and Identifying Migration Pathways Jakub Sowa, Bach Hoang, Advaith Yeluru, Steven Qie, Anita Nikolich, Ravishankar Iyer, Phuong M. Cao IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)
Pre-print PDF - True Attacks, Attack Attempts, or Benign Triggers? An Empirical Measurement of Network Alerts in a Security Operations Center Limin Yang, Zhi Chen, Chenkai Wang, Zhenning Zhang, Sushruth Booma, Phuong M. Cao, Constantin Adam, Alex Withers, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K. Iyer, Gang Wang 33rd USENIX Security Symposium PDF
- Taxonomy of Fingerprinting Techniques for Evaluation of Smart Grid Honeypot Realism Vanessa Tay, Xinran Li, Daisuke Mashima, Bennet Ng, Phuong M. Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K Iyer IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm), 2023 PDF
- Post-Quantum Cyberinfrastructure Security Readiness: Risks, Measures and Prospects Phuong M. Cao, Bach Hoang, Santiago Nunez-Corrales ASCR Workshop on Basic Research Needs in Quantum Computing and Networking, Department of Energy, (Position Paper), 2023. PDF
- stealthML: Data-driven Malware for Stealthy Data Exfiltration Keywhan Chung, Phuong M. Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K Iyer IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience, 2023 PDF
- Predicting ICU Admissions for Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients with a Factor Graph-based Model Yurui Cao, Phuong M. Cao, Haotian Chen, Karl M. Kochendorfer, Andrew B. Trotter, William L. Galanter, Paul M. Arnold, Ravishankar K Iyer AAAI-22 Health Intelligence Workshop PDF
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Investigating Root Causes of Authentication Failures Using a SAML and OIDC
Observatory
Jim Basney, Phuong M. Cao, Terry Fleury
IEEE DependSys 2020
PDF - Mining Threat Intelligence from Billion-scale SSH Brute-Force Attacks Yuming Wu, Phuong M. Cao, Alex Withers, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer Workshop on Decentralized IoT Systems and Security, co-located with NDSS, 2020 PDF
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CAUDIT: Continuous Auditing of SSH-Servers To Mitigate Brute-Force Attacks
Phuong M. 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 - SVAuth: A Single-Sign-On Integration Solution with Runtime Verification Shuo Chen, Matt McCutchen, Phuong M. Cao, Shaz Qadeer, and Ravishankar Iyer International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV), 2017 PDF Blackhat Europe presentation
- Preemptive intrusion detection: theoretical framework and real-world measurements Phuong M. Cao, Eric Badger, Adam Slagell, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar Iyer ACM Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security (HotSOS), 2015 PDF
- Security Monitoring for Virtual Machines Using Hardware Architectural Invariants Cuong Pham, Zachary Estrada, Phuong M. Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer IEEE Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2014 PDF
Magazine articles and workshops
- Building Reliable and Secure Virtual Machines Using Architectural Invariants Cuong Pham, Zachary Estrada, Phuong M. Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer IEEE Security and Privacy (S&P) Magazine, 2014 PDF
- Toward a high availability cloud: Techniques and challenges Cuong Pham, Phuong M. Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2012 PDF
Talks
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Post Quantum Cryptography auditing &
migration for HPC/supercomputer (WIP)
NSF Research Infrastructure Workshop, 2024
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Doctoral Showcase on HPC Security
Supercomputing (the ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking), 2023
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Security Log Analyses Tutorial and
TrustedCI
Fellows panel.
NSF Cybersecurity Summit at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 2023
Honors and Awards
- Outstanding Mentors, Students Pushing INnovation (SPIN) at NCSA, 2024
- Trusted CI Open Science Cybersecurity Fellow, Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity 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
Service
Proposal Review Panels: Department of Energy (2025) Proposal Review Panels: National Science Foundation (2024, 2025)
Program Committee Member: IEEE DSN 2024 Industry Track, IEEE QCE 2024, IEEE QCE 2025
Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
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
Press
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
1205 W. Clark St., Rm. 3006B, Urbana, Illinois, 61874