Hongying Dong
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Engineering, University of Virginia
About Me
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Engineering at University of Virginia, working with Professor Yixin Sun. My research centers on network security and privacy.Research Interests
- Network Security and Privacy: I am broadly interested in topics including TLS/PKI, DNS, routing infrastructure, IoT, etc.
- Internet Measurement: My research employs large-scale Internet measurements and data analysis to deepen insights into networked systems.
- Machine Learning: My research integrates advanced machine learning techniques to analyze networked systems and secure network entities.
Education
Ph.D Candidate in Computer Engineering
M.S. in Computer Science
M.A. in Chemistry
B.S. in Chemistry
Publications
- Exploring the Ecosystem of DNS HTTPS Resource Records: An End-to-End Perspective.
Hongying Dong*, Yizhe Zhang*, Hyeonmin Lee, Shumon Huque, and Yixin Sun
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024, November 2024
*Both authors contributed equally to this work. - Mutual TLS in Practice: A Deep Dive into Certificate Configurations and Privacy Issues.
Hongying Dong, Yizhe Zhang, Hyeonmin Lee, Kevin Du, Guancheng Tu, and Yixin Sun
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024, November 2024 - Behind the Scenes: Uncovering TLS and Server Certificate Practice of IoT Device Vendors in the Wild.
Hongying Dong, Hao Shu, Vijay Prakash, Yizhe Zhang, Muhammad Talha Paracha, David Choffnes, Santiago Torres-Arias, Danny Yuxing Huang, and Yixin Sun
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023, October 2023 - Global Analysis with Aggregation-based Beaconing Detection across Large Campus Networks.
Yizhe Zhang, Hongying Dong, Alastair Nottingham, Molly Buchanan, Donald E. Brown, and Yixin Sun
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2023, December 2023 - Towards Enabling Residential Virtual-Desktop Computing.
Hongying Dong, Aaron Teklay Kinfe, Jiakai Yu, Qi Liu, Dan Kilper, Ronald D. Williams, and Malathi Veeraraghavan
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (IEEE TCC) 2021, 2021 - Using the Capacity and Low Latency of Mobile Edge Clouds for Community Applications.
Dan Kilper, Hongying Dong, Aaron Teklay Kinfe, Jiakai Yu, Qi Liu, Kevin Kim, Bruce Lincoln
Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OCF) 2021, June 2021
Research Projects (Selected)
- [IMC'24] End-to-End Perspectives of DNS HTTPS Resource Records
- First to conduct a longitudinal study of server-side DNS HTTPS deployment for the top million Tranco domains and analyze client-side support using snapshots from major browsers.
- Disclosed the complexity and overhead in properly maintaining the validity of DNS HTTPS records to avoid connection failure.
- Identified inadequate failover mechanisms and lack of ECH Split Mode support in major browsers, resulting in connection failures.
- [IMC'24] Certificate Configurations and Privacy Issues of Mutual TLS in Practice
- Revealed concerning practices in certificate usage, including missing valid client certificate issuers, dummy certificate parameters, identical certificates used by both endpoints in single connections, and persistent use of long-expired client certificates.
- Uncovered a diverse range of sensitive information contained in the CN and SAN fields.
- [IMC'23] TLS and Vendor Practices of Home-based Internet-of-Things
- First to study TLS certificate management by IoT servers and vendors.
- Revealed the customization and sharing of non-optimal or insecure TLS instances among vendors and highlighted security concerns resulting from co-located TLS stacks of various services.
- [ACSAC’23] Aggregation-based Beaconing Detection
- Developed a system performing novel global analysis utilizing data across multiple organizations.
- Employed new data-adaptive multi-resolution techniques to detect periodicity patterns in the presence of large noises.
- Introduced self-training into the semi-supervised active-learning pipeline to perform detection on large volume of traffic with limited labels.
- [IEEE TCC 2021, OCF’21] Assessing Residential Applications via Thin-Client Virtual Desktops
- First to apply commercial-offering virtual-desktop solutions to residential users and evaluate GPU virtualization capabilities on the server side.
- Developed metrics to measure user-received video streaming quality and proposed an engineering solution to maximize satisfied users sharing edge-cloud computing resources.
Teaching
CHEM 3420: Physical Chemistry - Thermodynamics
CHEM 3811: Physical Chemistry I Laboratory
CHEM 2820: Principles of Chemical Thermodynamics and Kinetics (Accelerated)
CHEM 1811: Principles of Chemical Structure Laboratory (Accelerated)
Contact
hd7gr [at] virginia [dot] edu
