My research focuses on AI-enabled cybersecurity and intelligent cyber space sensing. I investigate fundamental challenges in complex network environments, including security detection, network measurement, and infrastructure security, aiming to enhance cyber space awareness and defense capabilities through artificial intelligence, network analytics, and active measurement techniques.
Key Question: How can we discover hidden attacks from seemingly normal network behaviors?
As cyber attacks become increasingly stealthy, attackers can hide their intentions behind encrypted communications, multi-stage attack campaigns, and legitimate network services. Traditional rule-based detection approaches face significant challenges in identifying emerging and sophisticated threats.
This direction studies how to discover abnormal behaviors and attack indicators from large-scale, multi-source, and encrypted network data. Our research focuses on:
Encrypted traffic analysis and intelligent detection;
APT behavior discovery and covert channel detection;
IoT and wireless network security defense.
Our results have been published in USENIX Security, IEEE TDSC, NDSS, and other top-tier security conferences and journals. Some of these achievements have received the First Prize of Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award.
Key Question: How can we continuously sense the ever-changing global Internet?
The Internet continues to expand with the rapid evolution of devices, protocols, and services. Accurately understanding the state of cyberspace at large scale remains a fundamental challenge.
This direction investigates intelligent measurement and analysis methods for large-scale network environments, with a focus on:
Network performance and user experience sensing;
Internet-scale probing and infrastructure mapping;
Network device discovery and behavior analysis.
Our research combines passive measurement and active probing techniques to understand network behaviors, discover Internet assets, and identify abnormal activities. The results have been published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), IEEE INFOCOM, and other leading conferences and journals. Some achievements have received the Huawei Spark Award for Solving Technical Challenges.
Key Question: How can we discover and defend against emerging attacks targeting Internet core infrastructures?
Core Internet infrastructures, such as DNS and transport protocols, are fundamental to modern Internet operations. However, their openness, complexity, and large-scale deployment also introduce new security risks.
This direction investigates security issues in Internet core protocols, focusing on:
DNS attack analysis and risk measurement;
Detection and defense of reflection amplification attacks;
Security enhancement of emerging network protocols.
Our results have been published in ACM CCS, IEEE TIFS, IEEE/ACM TON, and other top-tier security conferences and journals. Some achievements have received the First Prize of China Electronics Society Science and Technology Progress Award.
I have published more than 50 papers in leading conferences and journals, including USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, IEEE/ACM TON, IEEE TDSC, IEEE TIFS, and IEEE INFOCOM.
Selected Publications in Top Security and Networking Venues
Jianhao Li, Jialong Zhang, Jiawei Ding, Jianfeng Li, Ziqian Liu, Wei Wang, Zhou Su, Xiaobo Ma.
Weaponizing QNAME Minimization: Infrastructure-Free DNS Amplification via Resolver Orchestration.
ACM CCS 2026.
Jian Qu, Yuchen Zhang, Jialong Zhang, Jianfeng Li, Xiaobo Ma.
Tracegram: Framing Trace-Level Traffic Analysis with Temporally-Aware Multiple Instance Learning.
USENIX Security Symposium 2026.
Jianfeng Li, Yuchen Zhang, Jian Qu, Jialong Zhang, Xiaobo Ma.
NEST: A Node-Interactive Generative Emulation Framework for Synthetic Traffic Generation.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2026.
Xiaobo Ma, Pengyu Pan, Jianfeng Li, Wei Wang, Weizhi Meng, Xiaohong Guan.
ABC-Channel: An Advanced Blockchain-Based Covert Channel.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2026.
Jianfeng Li, Zheng Lin, Jianhao Li, Wen Li, Yifei Gao, Qinyu Liu, Xiaobo Ma, Wei Wang, Xiapu Luo, Xiaohong Guan.
Enabling Entangled Cache Probing for Remotely Reconstructing DNS Query Dynamics.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2026.
Huafeng Bian, Jianfeng Li, Haodan Luo, Yixuan Liu, Xiaobo Ma, Zhenhua Li, Jialong Zhang, Jigang Wang, Wei Wang.
AirCloak: An App-Transparent Traffic Cloaking Middleware Against Wireless Fingerprinting Attack.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2026.
Tianyu Qi, Lei Xue, Yufeng Zhan, Xiaobo Ma.
Sylva: Tailoring Personalized Adversarial Defense in Pre-trained Models via Collaborative Fine-tuning.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2025.
Jianfeng Li, Dongliang Wang, Yixuan Liu, Yifei Gao, Xiaorong Zhang, Zheng Lin, Xiaobo Ma, Xiapu Luo, Xiaohong Guan.
Cross-Environmental Website Fingerprinting.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2025.
Zhihao Wang, Lei Xue, Xiapu Luo, Xiaobo Ma, Guofei Gu.
Driving State-Aware Anomaly Detection for Autonomous Vehicles.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2025.
Xu Han, Haocong Li, Wei Wang, Haining Wang, Xiaobo Ma, Shouling Ji, Qiang Li.
SoFi: Spoofing OS Fingerprints Against Network Reconnaissance.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2025.
Xiaohan Yuan, Jiqiang Liu, Bin Wang, Wei Wang, Bin Wang, Tao Li, Xiaobo Ma, Witold Pedrycz.
FedComm: A Privacy-Enhanced and Efficient Authentication Protocol for Federated Learning in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2024.
Jian Qu, Xiaobo Ma, Wenmao Liu, Hongqing Sang, Jianfeng Li, Lei Xue, Xiapu Luo, Zhenhua Li, Li Feng, Xiaohong Guan.
On Smartly Scanning of the Internet of Things.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2024.
Xiaobo Ma, Jian Qu, Mawei Shi, Bingyu An, Jianfeng Li, Xiapu Luo, Junjie Zhang, Zhenhua Li, Xiaohong Guan.
Website Fingerprinting on Encrypted Proxies: A Flow-Context-Aware Approach and Countermeasures.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 2024.
Jian Qu, Xiaobo Ma, Jianfeng Li, Xiapu Luo, Lei Xue, Junjie Zhang, Zhenhua Li, Li Feng, Xiaohong Guan.
An Input-Agnostic Hierarchical Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Fingerprinting.
32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2023.
Jianfeng Li, Hao Zhou, Shuohan Wu, Xiapu Luo, Ting Wang, Xian Zhan, Xiaobo Ma, et al.
FOAP: Fine-Grained Open-World Android App Fingerprinting.
31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2022.
Jianfeng Li, Shuohan Wu, Hao Zhou, Xiapu Luo, Ting Wang, Yangyang Liu, Xiaobo Ma, et al.
Packet-Level Open-World App Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic.
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2022.
Jian Qu, Xiaobo Ma, Wenmao Liu, Hongqing Sang, Jianfeng Li, Lei Xue, Xiapu Luo, Zhenhua Li, Li Feng, Xiaohong Guan.
Landing Reinforcement Learning onto Smart Scanning of the Internet of Things.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2022.
Xiaobo Ma, Jian Qu, Mawei Shi, Bingyu An, Jianfeng Li, Xiapu Luo, Junjie Zhang, Xiaohong Guan.
Context-Aware Website Fingerprinting over Encrypted Proxies.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2021.
Xiaobo Ma, Jian Qu, Jianfeng Li, John C. S. Lui, Zhenhua Li, Xiaohong Guan.
Pinpointing Hidden IoT Devices via Spatial-Temporal Traffic Fingerprinting.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2020.
Xiaobo Ma, Bo An, Mengchen Zhao, Xiapu Luo, Lei Xue, Zhenhua Li, Tony T. N. Miu, Xiaohong Guan.
Randomized Security Patrolling for Link Flooding Attack Detection.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2020.
Lei Xue, Xiaobo Ma, Xiapu Luo, Edmond W. W. Chan, TungNgai Miu, Guofei Gu.
LinkScope: Toward Detecting Target Link Flooding Attacks.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2018.
Jianfeng Li, Xiaobo Ma, Guodong Li, Xiapu Luo, Junjie Zhang, Wei Li, Xiaohong Guan.
Can We Learn What People Are Doing from Raw DNS Queries?
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2018.
Lei Xue, Xiaobo Ma, Xiapu Luo, Le Yu, Shuai Wang, Ting Chen.
Is What You Measure What You Expect? Factors Affecting Smartphone-Based Mobile Network Measurement.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2017.
Jianfeng Li, Jing Tao, Xiaobo Ma, Junjie Zhang, Xiaohong Guan.
Modeling Repeating Behaviors in Packet Arrivals: Detection and Measurement.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2015.
Xiaobo Ma, Junjie Zhang, Jing Tao, Jianfeng Li, Jue Tian, Xiaohong Guan.
DNSRadar: Outsourcing Malicious Domain Detection Based on Distributed Cache-Footprints.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2014.
