Tao Hou
Ph.D. student,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida.
4202 E Fowler Ave, ENB 118, Tampa, FL 33620.
Phone: 813.390.8851      
Email: taohou@mail.usf.edu



 
I'm currently a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Unversity of South Florida. My advisors are Dr. Zhuo Lu and Dr. Yao Liu. I received my B.E. & M.E. degree from Jilin University, China. My research interests span quite a few areas, including network security, software security, high performance computing, and graph data analytics. Right now, I am working mostly on web security, binary analysis, and reverse engineering.

One of my calligraphy works, the contents come from a poem by Tang poet Li Bai, entitled HARD TRAVELING.

"A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves, I’ll set my cloud-white sail and cross the sea which raves."

Education
University of South Florida, Florida, USA   ( 2015 - Present )
Ph.D. student, RA in The Communications, Security, and Analytics (CSA) Lab.
Jilin University, Jilin, China   ( 2013 - 2015 )
Master student, RA in Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education of China.
Jilin University, Jilin, China   ( 2009 - 2013 )
Undergraduate student, RA in Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education of China.
Research Projects

Web Security: Development of Vulnerability Measurement and Defense Techniques     [2017 ~ Present]

World Wide Web is a critical infrastructure that serves our society by facilitating information exchange, business and education. Our works focus on improving the security of the Internet, including developing new techniques for vulnerability measurement, and risk defense at Internet wide scale in a timely, accurate, complete, and ethical manner.

SELECT: Secure and Lightweight Computing Environment for HPC systems     [2016 ~ 2018]

Providing strong cyber security tools that can protect the data and prevent tampering is of critical importance to secure HPC systems. Nonetheless, there are still no comprehensive software design and implementation to systemically address cyber security issues in HPC systems. To address this need, we propose to develop a Secure and Lightweight Computing Environment (SELECT) software tool for HPC systems, and the key innovation is to integrate both coarse-grained security and fine-grained security with low overhead to provide sensitive data leakage detection and real-time tampering defense.

MSanalysis: A Push-based System for Molecular Simulation Data Analysis     [2016]

The frontend user interface of MSanalysis is a web application written by python based on Django, while the backend processing engine is developed by C++ following the proposed push-based data processing model.
Known scientific data analysis systems, as well as traditional DBMSs, follow a pull-based architectural design, where the executed queries mandate the data needed. Such design involves redundant and random I/Os, considerably affecting the data throughput in the system. We design and implement a push-based type system that allows high-throughput data analysis in the process of scientific discovery. By this way the system lowers the unnecessary I/O overhead imposed by the randomized, index-based scan and that of a multiple data reads if each query were to be fed separately.

Distributed MD data analysis system on top of Spark     [2016]

The past few years witnessed the prosperity of large-scale distributed data analysis, with a large number of systems being developed. Among them, systems based on the MapReduce programming model gained much attention due to their promises to scale up algorithms to a large number of nodes. Such promises were verified in large-scale MD simulations and MD data analysis. A more recent system named Spark delivers even better performance. In this project, we develop a system for distributed MD data analysis on top of Spark.
Publications


Signal Entanglement based Pinpoint Waveforming for Location-restricted Service Access Control     [ PDF ] 
Tao Wang, Yao Liu, Tao Hou, Qingqi Pei, and Song Fang
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2016
 

Location-restricted Services Access Control Leveraging Pinpoint Waveforming     [ PDF ]  [ Video Demo ]
Tao Wang, Yao Liu, Qingqi Pei, and Tao Hou
Proceedings of 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'15), Denver, Colorado, 2015
 

Works
Experience
I create and organize the China fan club of famous actor Lee Minho. There are more than 368,560 fans join our club's membership since 2009. We have more than 30 provincial club chapters all over the China mainland, and 4 special chapters for Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
Website: Minhofans.com       Weibo: @Minhofans       Wechat Official Platform: LOVEMHF
Info

Teaching

CGS1540.701F16 Intro to Database (TA, Fall 2016)
COP4710.001S16 Database Design (TA, Spring 2016)

Paper Reviewers

IEEE CCNCPS 2017
IEEE CNS 2017, 2018
ACM CCS-MTD 2017
International Journal of Security and Networks (IJSN)
IEEE SmartGridComm 2017
IEEE Access
IEEE ICC 2018

Awards

USENIX Security'18 Student Grant
Florida's TEAm scholarship (USF)
Outstanding Graduate Student Scholarship (Jilin University)
Outstanding Thesis (Jilin University)
Black Hat USA 2018 Student Scholarship
Second-class Academic Scholarship (Jilin University)
Provincial-Level Merit Student

Professional Memberships

Student member of IEEE
Member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society

Useful Links

Tracking Communications, Network, and Security Conferences: Click Here
CCF Computer Science Journal & Conference Ranking: Click Here
Computer Security Conference Ranking and Statistic: Click Here
How to wirte a paper summary: Click Here
Markdown quick guide: Click Here
Contact Me

Phone: 813-390-8851    Email: taohou@mail.usf.edu
My office is located in ENB 238, Unversity of South Florida, 4202 E Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL, 33620
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