Guofei Gu

Eppright Professor in Engineering
Presidential Impact Fellow

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Texas A&M University

Office: Peterson 239

Phone: (979) 845-2475

Email: guofei [AT] cse.tamu.edu

I am a professor and holder of the Eppright Professorship in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. Before joining Texas A&M, I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the College of Computing, Georgia Tech, in 2008. I am an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Member. I'm currently directing the SUCCESS (Secure Communication and Computer Systems) Lab at TAMU.

A short bio is available here. Find out what's

here.

Research Overview (SUCCESS Lab Page)

I'm interested in all aspects of network and system security. At SUCCESS Lab, we are pioneering the future of cybersecurity by making security programmable, intelligent, and ubiquitous. Our current specific research interests include: ( more details at lab research page)
- Programmable Security
  - Software-defined next-generation networks and systems (e.g., SDN, NFV, Cloud, Edge, 5G, ...)
- Intelligent Security
  - AI for Cybersecurity
  - Security for AI
- Ubiquitous Security
Research data/tool release
I am maintaining a list of computer security conference ranking and statistic
Some useful resources, links

Major Awards/Honors

IEEE Fellow, for contributions to malware detection and security of next-generation networks, class of 2020
ACM Distinguished Member, for outstanding scientific contributions to computing, 2019
Google Faculty Research Award, 2014
AFOSR Young Investigator Award, 2013
NSF CAREER Award, 2010
Test-of-Time and Best Paper Award

Test of Time Award, DSN 2025 (our DSN'15 FloodGuard paper)
Test of Time Award, ACSAC 2023 (our ACSAC'07 Botnet Structures paper)
Best Paper Award, ASIACCS'22, 2022
Best Paper Award, ICDCS'15, 2015
Best Student Paper Award, IEEE S&P'10, 2010
Finalist (top 10) for CSAW 2016 Best Applied Security Paper award (our PBS paper), 2016
Finalist (top 10) for CSAW 2015 Best Applied Security Paper award (our AutoProbe paper), 2015
Finalist (top 10) for CSAW 2013 Best Applied Security Paper award (our FRESCO paper), 2013

University Awards

TEES Faculty Fellow Award, TAMU, 2023
Engineering Genesis Award, TAMU, 2023
Eppright Professorship in Engineering, TAMU, 2020
William O. and Montine P. Head Memorial Award for contributions to engineering, TAMU, 2020
Lynn '84 and Bill Crane '83 Faculty Fellow, 2019
Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow, 2019
TEES Faculty Fellow Award, 2019
TEES Research Impact Award, 2018
Texas A&M Dean of Engineering Excellence Award, 2018
Charles H. Barclay Jr. '45 Faculty Fellow Award, 2017

Selected Publications (Full list here; or see my Google Scholar page: 20,000+ citations as of March 2025)

Jianwei Huang, Sridatta Chintapalli, Mengxiao Wang, Guofei Gu. "Beyond Visual Confusion: Understanding How Inconsistencies in ENS Normalization Facilitate Homoglyph Attacks. " In Proc. of the 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW'25), 2025.
Huancheng Zhou and Guofei Gu. "Cerberus: Enabling Efficient and Effective In-Network Monitoring on Programmable Switches." In Proc. of the 45^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'24), May 2024. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Xuanbo Huang, Kaiping Xue, Lutong Chen, Mingrui Ai, Huancheng Zhou, Bo Luo, Guofei Gu, Qibin Sun. "You Can Obfuscate, but You Cannot Hide: CrossPoint Attacks against Network Topology Obfuscation. " In Proc. of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (Security'24), Philadelphia, USA, August 2024. [pdf] [bib]
Huancheng Zhou, Sungmin Hong, Yangyang Liu, Xiapu Luo, Weichao Li, Guofei Gu. "Mew: Enabling Large-Scale and Dynamic Link-Flooding Defenses on Programmable Switches." In Proc. of the 44^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P"23), May 2023. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong, Jianwei Huang, Guofei Gu. "SWAPP: A New Programmable Playground for Web Application Security." In Proc. of the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (Security"22), Boston, USA, August 2022. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Hongda Li, Qiqing Huang, Fei Ding, Hongxin Hu, Long Cheng, Guofei Gu, Ziming Zhao. "Understanding and Detecting Remote Infection on Linux-based IoT Devices." In Proceedings of 2022 ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS"22), Japan, June 2022. (Acceptance rate 18.4% =54/294) (Best Paper Award!) [pdf] [bib]
Lei Xue, Yangyang Liu, Tianqi LI, Kaifa Zhao, Jianfeng Li, Le Yu, Xiapu Luo, Yajin Zhou, Guofei Gu. "SAID: State-aware Defense Against Injection Attacks on In-vehicle Network. " In Proc. of the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (Security"22), Boston, USA, August 2022. [pdf] [bib]
Le Yu, Y. Liu, P. Jing, X. Luo, L. Xue, K. Zhao, Y. Zhou, T. Wang, G. Gu, S. Nie, and S. Wu. "Towards Automatically Reverse Engineering Vehicle Diagnostic Protocols." In Proc. of the 31th USENIX Security Symposium (Security"22), Boston, USA, August 2022. [pdf] [bib]
Feng Xiao, Jianwei Huang, Yichang Xiong, Guangliang, Hong Hu, Guofei Gu, Wenke Lee. "Abusing Hidden Properties to Attack the Node.js Ecosystem. " In Proc. of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (Security"21), Vancouver, Canada, August 11-13, 2021. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Lei Xue, Hao Zhou, Xiapu Luo, Yajin Zhou, Yang Shi, Guofei Gu, Fengwei Zhang, Man Ho Au. "Happer: Unpacking Android Apps via a Hardware-Assisted Approach. " In Proc. of the 42^nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P"21), May 2021. [pdf] [bib]
Feng Xiao, Jinquan Zhang, Jianwei Huang, Guofei Gu, Dinghao Wu, Peng Liu. "Unexpected Data Dependency Creation and Chaining: A New Attack to SDN." In Proc. of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P"20), San Francisco, CA, May 2020. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Ting Chen, Rong Cao, Ting Li, Xiapu Luo, Guofei Gu, Yufei Zhang, Zhou Liao, Hang Zhu, Gang Chen, Zheyuan He, Yuxing Tang, Xiaodong Lin, Xiaosong Zhang. "SODA: A Generic Online Detection Framework for Smart Contracts." In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'20), San Diego, California, Feb. 2020. [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Menghao Zhang, Guanyu Li, Shicheng Wang, Chang Liu, Ang Chen, Hongxin Hu, Guofei Gu, Qi Li, Mingwei Xu, and Jianping Wu. "Poseidon: Mitigating Volumetric DDoS Attacks with Programmable Switches." In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'20), San Diego, California, Feb. 2020. [pdf] [bib]
Jiahao Cao, Renjie Xie, Kun Sun, Qi Li, Guofei Gu, 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'20), San Diego, California, Feb. 2020. [pdf] [bib]
Guangliang Yang, Jeff Huang, Guofei Gu. "Iframes/Popups Are Dangerous in Mobile WebView: Studying and Mitigating Differential Context Vulnerabilities." In Proc. of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'19), Santa Clara, CA, August 2019. [pdf] [bib]
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 (Security'19), Santa Clara, CA, August 2019. [pdf] [bib]
Yangyong Zhang, Lei Xu, Abner Mendoza, Guangliang Yang, Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong, Guofei Gu. "Life after Speech Recognition: Fuzzing Semantic Misinterpretation for Voice Assistant Applications." In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'19), San Diego, California, Feb. 2019. (Acceptance rate: 17%=89/521 ) [pdf] [bib] (Project website with code release)
Haopei Wang, Guangliang Yang, Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong, Lei Xu, Yangyong Zhang, Guofei Gu. "Towards Fine-grained Network Security Forensics and Diagnosis in the SDN Era." In Proc. of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'18), Toronto, Canada, October 2018. (Acceptance rate: 16.6%=134/809) [pdf] [bib] (Release info)
Hongda Li, Hongxin Hu, Guofei Gu, Gail-Joon Ahn, Fuqiang Zhang. "vNIDS: Towards Elastic Security with Safe and Efficient Virtualization of Network Intrusion Detection Systems." In Proc. of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'18), Toronto, Canada, October 2018. (Acceptance rate: 16.6%=134/809) [pdf] [bib]
Abner Mendoza, Guofei Gu. "Mobile Application Web API Reconnaissance: Web-to-Mobile Inconsistencies & Vulnerabilities. " In Proc. of the 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'18), San Francisco, CA, May 2018. (Acceptance rate: 11.5%=63/549) [pdf] [bib]
Guangliang Yang, Jeff Huang, Guofei Gu, Abner Mendoza. "Study and Mitigation of Origin Stripping Vulnerabilities in Hybrid-postMessage Enabled Mobile Applications." In Proc. of the 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'18), San Francisco, CA, May 2018. (Acceptance rate: 11.5%=63/549) [pdf] [bib] (Project website with code release)
Abner Mendoza, Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong and Guofei Gu. "Uncovering HTTP Header Inconsistencies and the Impact on Desktop/Mobile Websites." In Proc. of the Web Conference (WWW'18), Lyon, France, April 2018. (Acceptance rate 14.8%=171/1155) [pdf] [bib]
Guangliang Yang, Jeff Huang, Guofei Gu. "Automated Generation of Event-Oriented Exploits in Android Hybrid Apps." In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'18), San Diego, California, Feb. 2018. (Acceptance rate: 21.5% = 71/331) [pdf] [bib]
Lei Xu, Jeff Huang, Sungmin Hong, Jialong Zhang, Guofei Gu. "Attacking the Brain: Races in the SDN Control Plane." In Proc. of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'17), Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 2017. (Acceptance rate 16%=85/522) [pdf] [bib]
Lei Xue, Yajin Zhou, Ting Chen, Xiapu Luo, Guofei Gu. "Malton: Towards On-Device Non-Invasive Mobile Malware Analysis for ART." In Proc. of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'17), Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 2017. (Acceptance rate 16%=85/522) [pdf] [bib]
Sungmin Hong, Robert Baykov, Lei Xu, Srinath Nadimpalli, Guofei Gu. "Towards SDN-Defined Programmable BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Security." In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'16), San Diego, California, Feb. 2016. (Acceptance rate 15.4%=60/389) [pdf] [bib] (Finalist for CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award 2016)
Yuhong Nan, Min Yang, Zhemin Yang, Shunfan Zhou, Guofei Gu, Xiaofeng Wang. "UIPicker: User-Input Privacy Identification in Mobile Applications." In Proc. of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'15), Washington DC, August 2015. (Acceptance rate 15.7%=67/426) [pdf] [bib]
Jialong Zhang, Sabyasachi Saha, Guofei Gu, Sung-Ju Lee, and Marco Mellia. "Systematic Mining of Associated Server Herds for Malware Campaign Discovery." In Proc. of the 35th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'15), Columbus, OH, June 2015. (Acceptance rate 12.9%=70/543) [pdf] [bib] (Best Paper Award!)
Haopei Wang, Lei Xu, Guofei Gu. "FloodGuard: A DoS Attack Prevention Extension in Software-Defined Networks." In Proc. of the 45th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'15), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 2015. (Acceptance rate 21.8%=50/229) [pdf] [bib] (Test of Time Award!)
Sungmin Hong*, Lei Xu*, Haopei Wang, Guofei Gu. "Poisoning Network Visibility in Software-Defined Networks: New Attacks and Countermeasures." In Proc. of 22nd Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'15), San Diego, CA, USA. February 2015. (*co-first author) Acceptance rate 16.9%=51/302 [pdf] [bib] (TopoGuard source code now available!)
Zhaoyan Xu, Antonio Nappa, Robert Baykov, Guangliang Yang, Juan Caballero, and Guofei Gu. "AutoProbe: Towards Automatic Active Malicious Server Probing Using Dynamic Binary Analysis." In Proc. of the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'14), Scottsdale, AZ, November 2014 (Acceptance rate 19.5%=114/585) [pdf] [bib] (Finalist for CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award 2015)
Antonio Nappa, Zhaoyan Xu, M. Zubair Rafique, Juan Caballero and Guofei Gu. "CyberProbe: Towards Internet-Scale Active Detection of Malicious Servers." In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'14), San Diego, CA, USA, February 2014. (Acceptance rate 18.6%=55/295) [pdf] [bib]
Seungwon Shin, Vinod Yegneswaran, Phil Porras, and Guofei Gu. "AVANT-GUARD: Scalable and Vigilant Switch Flow Management in Software-Defined Networks." In Proc. of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13), Berlin, Germany, November 2013. (Acceptance rate: 19.8%=105/530) [pdf] [bib]
Zhemin Yang, Min Yang, Yuan Zhang, Guofei Gu, Peng Ning and X. Sean Wang. "AppIntent: Analyzing Sensitive Data Transmission in Android for Privacy Leakage Detection." In Proc. of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13), Berlin, Germany, November 2013. (Acceptance rate: 19.8%=105/530) [pdf] [bib]
Yuan Zhang, Min Yang, Bingquan Xu, Zhemin Yang, Guofei Gu, Peng Ning, X. Sean Wang and Binyu Zang. "Vetting Undesirable Behaviors in Android Apps with Permission Use Analysis." In Proc. of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13), Berlin, Germany, November 2013. (Acceptance rate: 19.8%=105/530) [pdf] [bib]
Seungwon Shin, Phillip Porras, Vinod Yegneswaran, Martin Fong, Guofei Gu, and Mabry Tyson. "FRESCO: Modular Composable Security Services for Software-Defined Networks." In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'13), San Diego, CA, USA, February 2013. (Acceptance rate 18.8%=47/250) [pdf] [bib] (Finalist for CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award 2013) (FRESCO Project Website)
Jialong Zhang and Guofei Gu. "NeighborWatcher: A Content-Agnostic Comment Spam Inference System." In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'13), San Diego, CA, USA. February 2013. (Acceptance ratio 18.8%=47/250) [pdf] [bib]
Zhaoyan Xu, Lingfeng Chen, Guofei Gu and Christopher Kruegel. "PeerPress: Utilizing Enemies' P2P Strength against Them." In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'12), Raleigh, NC, USA, October 2012. (Acceptance rate 18.9%=80/423) [pdf] [bib] [slides]
Chao Yang, Robert Harkreader, Jialong Zhang, Suengwon Shin, and Guofei Gu. "Analyzing Spammers' Social Networks For Fun and Profit -- A Case Study of Cyber Criminal Ecosystem on Twitter." In Proceedings of the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'12), Lyon, France, April 2012. (Acceptance rate 12%=108/885) [pdf] [bib] (Dataset release)
Tielei Wang, Tao Wei, Guofei Gu, Wei Zou. "TaintScope: A Checksum-Aware Directed Fuzzing Tool for Automatic Software Vulnerability Detection." In Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P'10), Oakland, CA, May 2010. (Acceptance rate 11.6%=31/267) [pdf] [Journal Version] [bib] [slides] (Best Student Paper Award)
Guofei Gu, Roberto Perdisci, Junjie Zhang, and Wenke Lee. "BotMiner: Clustering Analysis of Network Traffic for Protocol- and Structure-Independent Botnet Detection." In Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'08), San Jose, CA, 2008. (Acceptance rate 15.9%=27/170) [pdf] [bib] [slides]
Guofei Gu, Junjie Zhang, and Wenke Lee. "BotSniffer: Detecting Botnet Command and Control Channels in Network Traffic." In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'08), San Diego, CA, February 2008. (Acceptance rate 17.8%=21/118) [pdf] [bib] [slides]
David Dagon, Guofei Gu, Chris Lee, and Wenke Lee. "A Taxonomy of Botnet Structures." In Proceedings of the 23 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'07), Miami Beach, FL, December 2007. (Acceptance rate 22%=42/191) [pdf] [bib] (Test of Time Award!)
Guofei Gu, Phillip Porras, Vinod Yegneswaran, Martin Fong, and Wenke Lee. "BotHunter: Detecting Malware Infection Through IDS-Driven Dialog Correlation." In Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'07), Boston, MA, August 2007. (Acceptance rate 12.3%=23/187) [pdf] [bib] [slides] [system]
BotHunter free Internet release now available!

Teaching

CSCE 313 Introduction to Computer Systems
CSCE 465 Computer & Network Security
CSCE 665 Advanced Networking and Security
CPSC 689 Special Topics in Computer and Network Security

Professional Services

Editorial Service (selected)

Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Conference/Workshop Organization (selected)

Steering Committee co-chair, International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), 2014 - 2024
Steering Committee, ACSAC, 2019 - present
General chair, ACSAC 2022, 2023
Program co-chair, ASIACCS 2020
Program co-chair, ACSAC 2018, 2019
Area TPC chair, ACM CCS 2018, 2019
Area TPC chair, IEEE CNS 2017, 2018

Program committee member (selected)

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2011, 2012, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025
USENIX Security Symposium (Security), 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025
ISOC Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), 2009, 2018, 2019, 2020
ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communication Security (ASIACCS), 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022
International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2016, 2017
The Web Conference (WWW), 2020, 2021, 2022

Fellow of IEEE, Distinguished Member of ACM, Member of USENIX