Publications
2025 
- OMAD5G: Online Malware Detection in 5G Networks using Compound Paths [ pdf ] [ code ]
Zhixin Wen and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 20th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'25), Hanoi, Vietnam, August 2025. Accepted.
- ACGuard5GC: Privacy-Preserving Prevention of Access Control Attacks within 5G Core Networks [ pdf ]
Harsh Sanjay Pacherkar and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 30th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT'25), Stony Brook, NY, USA, July 2025. Accepted.
2024 
- Graphite: Real-Time Graph-Based Detection of Windows Fileless Malware Attacks [ pdf ]
Priti Wakodikar, Joon-Young Gwak, Meng Wang, Guanhua Yan, Xiaokui Shu, Scott Stoller, and Ping Yang.
Proceedings of the EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SECURECOMM'24). Dubai, UAE, October 2024.
- HiP4-UPF: Towards High-Performance Comprehensive 5G User Plane Function on P4 Programmable Switches [ pdf ] [ code ]
Zhixin Wen and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 2024 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC'24), Santa Clara, CA, USA, July 2024.
- PROV5GC: Hardening 5G Core Network Security with Attack Detection and Attribution Based on Provenance Graphs [ pdf ]
Harsh Sanjay Pacherkar and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WISEC'24), Seoul, Korea, May 2024.
2023
- EAGLE: Evasion Attacks Guided by Local Explanations against Android Malware Classification [ pdf ]
Zhan Shu and Guanhua Yan.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC'23).
- Debugging Malware Classification Models Based on Event Logs with Explainable AI [ pdf ]
Joon-Young Gwak, Priti Wakodikar, Meng Wang, Guanhua Yan, Xiaokui Shu, Scott Stoller, and Ping Yang.
Proceedings of the 2023 ICDM Workshop on Causal and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (CXAI'23). Shanghai, China, December 2023.
2022
- IoTInfer: Automated Blackbox Fuzz Testing of IoT Network Protocols Guided by Finite State Machine Inference [ pdf ]
Zhan Shu and Guanhua Yan.
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IOTJ'22). Volume: 9, Issue: 22. November 2022.
- VET5G: A Virtual End-to-End Testbed for 5G Network Security Experimentation [ pdf ]
Zhixin Wen, Harsh Sanjay Pacherkar, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET'22), Virtual, August 2022.
- CFGExplainer: Explaining Graph Neural Network-Based Malware Classification from Control Flow Graphs [ pdf ] [ code ]
J. Dinal Herath, Priti Prabhakar Wakodikar, Ping Yang, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'22), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2022.
2021
- Real-Time Evasion Attacks against Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection from Distributed System Logs [ pdf ] [ code ]
J. Dinal Herath, Ping Yang, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of The 11th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY'21), Virtual, April 2021.
2020
- IoTReplay: Troubleshooting COTS IoT Devices with Record and Replay [ pdf ]
Kaiming Fang and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of The Fifth ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC'20), San Jose (Virtual Event), CA, USA, November 2020.
Mentioned in the following courses (appreciated!):
- Paging Storm Attacks against 4G/LTE Networks from Regional Android Botnets: Rationale, Practicality, and Implications [ pdf ]
Kaiming Fang and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of The 13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WISEC'20), Linz (Virtual Event), Austria, July 2020.
- Deceiving Portable Executable Malware Classifiers into Targeted Misclassification with Practical Adversarial Examples [ pdf ]
Yunus Kucuk and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY'20), New Orleans (Virtual Event), LA, USA, March 2020.
2019
- RAMP: Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Scientific Workflows [ pdf ] [ code ]
J. Dinal Herath, Changxin Bai, Guanhua Yan, Ping Yang, and Shiyong Lu.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BIGDATA'19), Los Angeles, CA, USA, December 2019.
- SciBlock: A Blockchain-Based Tamper-Proof Non-Repudiable Storage for Scientific Workflow Provenance [ pdf ]
Dinuni Fernando, Siddharth Kulshrestha, J. Dinal Herath, Nitin Mahadik, Yanzhe Ma, Changxin Bai, Ping Yang, Guanhua Yan, and Shiyong Lu.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet (CIC'19), Los Angeles, CA, USA, December 2019.
- Classifying Malware Represented as Control Flow Graphs using Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Network [ pdf ][ code ]
Jiaqi Yan, Guanhua Yan, and Dong Jin.
Proceedings of the 49th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'19), Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2019.
2018
- The Rise of Social Botnets: Attacks and Countermeasures [ pdf ]
Jinxue Zhang, Rui Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, and Guanhua Yan.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC'18), Vol. 15, No. 6, November/December 2018.
- Ensuring Deception Consistency for FTP Services Hardened against Advanced Persistent Threats [ pdf ]
Zhan Shu and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of The 5th ACM Workshop on Moving Target Defense (MTD'18). In conjunction with the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'18). Toronto, Canada, October 2018.
Mentioned in the following social media articles (appreciated!):
- BigBing: Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Based Malware Classification Service [ pdf ]
Yunus Kucuk, Nikhil Patil, Zhan Shu, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of The 2nd IEEE Symposium on Privacy-Aware Computing (PAC'18), Washington DC, USA, September 2018.
- Emulation-Instrumented Fuzz Testing of 4G/LTE Android Mobile Devices Guided by Reinforcement Learning [ pdf ]
Kaiming Fang and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'18), Barcelona, Spain, September 2018.
2017
- ExploitMeter: Combining Fuzzing with Machine Learning for Automated Evaluation of Software Exploitability [ pdf ][ code ]
Guanhua Yan, Junchen Lu, Zhan Shu, and Yunus Kucuk.
Proceedings of The 1st IEEE Symposium on Privacy-Aware Computing (PAC'17), Washington DC, USA, August 2017.
Mentioned in the following presentations (appreciated!):
Translated to Chinese in this article (appreciated!).
- Improving efficiency of link clustering on multi-core machines [ pdf ][ code ]
Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'17), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June 2017.
2016
- A Bayesian cognitive approach to quantifying software exploitability based on reachability testing [ pdf ][ extended ]
Guanhua Yan, Yunus Kucuk, Max Slocum, and David C. Last.
Proceedings of the 19th Information Security Conference (ISC'16), Hawaii, USA, September 2016.
2015
- Be sensitive to your errors: Chaining Neyman-Pearson criteria for automated malware classification [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'15), Singapore, April 2015.
2014
- Sim-watchdog: Leveraging temporal similarity for anomaly detection in dynamic graphs [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'14), Madrid, Spain, June 2014.
- Transductive malware label propagation: Find your lineage from your neighbors [ pdf ]
Deguang Kong and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'14), Toronto, Canada, April 2014.
- Finding common ground among experts' opinions on data clustering: With applications in malware analysis [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'14), Chicago, IL, USA, April 2014.
2013
- SmartAssoc: Decentralized Access Point Selection Algorithm to Improve Throughput [ pdf ]
Fengyuan Xu, Xiaojun Zhu, Chiu C. Tan, Qun Li, Guanhua Yan, and Jie Wu.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 24(12), December 2013.
- Containing Viral Spread on Sparse Random Graphs: Bounds, Algorithms, and Experiments [ pdf ]
Milan Bradonjic, Michael Molloy, and Guanhua Yan.
Internet Mathematics (IM), 9(4), November 2013.
- On the Impact of Social Botnets for Spam Distribution and Digital-influence Manipulation [ pdf ]
Jinxue Zhang, Rui Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS'13), October 2013.
- Privacy-Preserving Profile Matching for Proximity-Based Mobile Social Networking [ pdf ]
Rui Zhang, Jinxue Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, Jinyuan Sun, and Guanhua Yan.
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special Issue on Emerging Technologies, 31(9), September 2013.
- Discriminant Malware Distance Learning on Structural Information for Automated Malware Classification [ pdf ]
Deguang Kong and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'13), Chicago, IL, USA, August 2013.
- Exploring Discriminatory Features for Automated Malware Classification [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Nathan Brown, and Deguang Kong.
Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA'13), Berlin, Germany, July 2013.
- Analysis of misinformation containment in online social networks [ pdf ]
Nam P. Nguyen, Guanhua Yan, and My T. Thai.
Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), Special Edition on Towards a Science of Cyber Security, 57(10), July 2013.
- Discriminant Malware Distance Learning on Structural Information for Automated Malware Classification [ pdf ]
Deguang Kong and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS'13 poster), Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 2013.
- iDispatcher: A Unified Platform for Secure Planet-Scale Information Dissemination [ pdf ]
Md Sazzadur Rahman, Guanhua Yan, Harsha Madhyastha, Michalis Faloutsos, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Mike Fisk.
Springer Journal of Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications (PPNA), 6(1), March 2013.
- Peri-Watchdog: Hunting for hidden botnets in the periphery of online social networks [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan.
Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), Special Edition on Botnet Activity: Analysis, Detection and Shutdown, 57(2), February 2013.
2012
- Towards a Bayesian Network Game Framework for Evaluating DDoS Attacks and Defense [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Ritchie Lee, Alex Kent, and David Wolpert.
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference (CCS'12), October 2012.
- Detection of Selfish Manipulation of Carrier Sensing in 802.11 Networks [ pdf ]
Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Srikanth Krishnamurthy.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 11(7), July 2012.
- Containment of Misinformation Spread in Online Social Networks [ pdf ]
Nam P. Nguyen, Guanhua Yan, My T. Thai, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 4th ACM Web Science (WEBSCI'12, Test-of-Time Award), June 2012.
- Fine-grained private matching for proximity-based mobile social networking [ pdf ]
Rui Zhang, Yanchao Zhang, Jinyuan Sun, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication (INFOCOM'12), March 2012.
- Chrome Extensions: Threat Analysis and Countermeasures [ pdf ]
Lei Liu, Xinwen Zhang, Guanhua Yan, and Songqing Chen.
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'12), February 2012.
- On Tuning the Knobs of Distribution-based Methods for Detecting VoIP Covert Channels [ pdf ]
Chrisil Arackaparambil, Guanhua Yan, Sergey Bratus, and Alper Caglayan.
Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'12), January 2012.
2011
- An Event Buffer Flooding Attack against DNP3-Controlled SCADA Systems [ pdf ]
Dong Jin, David M. Nicol, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'11), December 2011.
- RatBot: Anti-Enumeration Peer-to-Peer Botnets [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Songqing Chen, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 14th Information Security Conference (ISC'11), October 2011.
- Wiki-watchdog: Anomaly Detection in Wikipedia Through a Distributional Lens [ pdf ]
Chrisil Arackaparambil and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of IEEE/WIC/ACM Web Intelligence (WI'11), August 2011.
- Measuring the Effectiveness of Infrastructure-Level Detection of Large-Scale Botnets [ pdf ]
Yuanyuan Zeng, Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Kang G. Shin.
Proceedings of 19th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS'11), June 2011.
- AntBot: Anti-Pollution Peer-to-Peer Botnet [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Duc T. Ha, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), 55(8), June 2011.
Mentioned in the following social media articles (appreciated!):
- Privacy analysis of user association logs in a large-scale wireless LAN [ pdf ]
Keren Tan, Guanhua Yan, Jihwang Yeo, and David Kotz.
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'11, mini Conference), April 2011.
- Geography-Based Analysis of the Internet Infrastructure [ pdf ]
Shiva Kasiviswanathan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'11, mini Conference), April 2011.
- Malware Propagation in Online Social Networks: Nature, Dynamics, and Defense Implications [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Guanling Chen, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Nan Li.
Proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'11), March 2011.
Mentioned in the following courses (appreciated!):
- Taught by Prof. Jeremiah Onaolapo@University of Vermont: CS395A. Social Media Behavior (Spring 2021)
2010
- CyberSim: Geographic, Temporal, and Organizational Dynamics of Malware Propagation [ pdf ]
Nandakishore Santhi, Guanhua Yan, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 2010 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'10), December 2010.
- A Correlation Attack Against User Mobility Privacy in a Large-scale WLAN network [ pdf ]
Keren Tan, Guanhua Yan, Jihwang Yeo, and David Kotz.
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM MobiCom Workshop on Wireless of the Students, by the Students, for the Students (MOBICOM S3'10), September 2010.
- sePlugin: Towards Transparently Secure Plugins in Your Internet Explorers [ pdf ]
Lei Liu, Xinwen Zhang, Guanhua Yan, and Songqing Chen.
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'10, industrial track), June 2010.
- Criticality Analysis of Internet Infrastructures [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, Sunil Thulasidasan, Pallab Datta, and Venkatesh Ramaswamy.
Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), 54(7), May 2010.
- Designing a Better Access Point Association Protocol [ pdf ]
Fengyuan Xu, Chiu C. Tan, Qun Li, Guanhua Yan, and Jie Wu.
Proceedings of the 29th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'10), March 2010.
2009
- Self-propagating mal-packets in wireless sensor networks: Dynamics and defense implications [ pdf ]
Bo Sun, Guanhua Yan, Yang Xiao, and T. Andrew Yang.
Ad Hoc Networks (ADHOC), November 2009.
- Exploitation and threat analysis of open mobile devices [ pdf ]
Lei Liu, Xinwen Zhang, Guanhua Yan, and Songqing Chen.
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS'09), October 2009.
- SMS-Watchdog: Profiling Social Behaviors of SMS Users for Anomaly Detection [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Emanuele Galli.
Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID'09), September 2009.
- VirusMeter: Preventing Your Cellphone from Spies [ pdf ]
Lei Liu, Guanhua Yan, Xinwen Zhang, and Songqing Chen.
Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID'09), September 2009.
- Blue-Watchdog: Detecting Bluetooth Worm Propagation in Public Areas [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Leticia Cuellar, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Nicolas Hengartner.
Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'09), June 2009.
- On the Effectiveness of Structural Detection and Defense against P2P-based Botnets [ pdf ]
Duc T. Ha, Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Hung Q. Ngo.
Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'09), June 2009.
- Detecting Selfish Exploitation of Carrier Sensing in 802.11 WLANs [ pdf ]
Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Srikanth Krishnamurthy.
Proceedings of the 28th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'09), April 2009.
- Mobi-Watchodog: You Can Steal, But You Can't Run! [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Bo Sun.
Proceedings of the Second ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WISEC'09), March 2009.
- Modeling Propagation Dynamics of Bluetooth Worms (Extended Version) [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), March 2009.
2008
- Self-propagate Mal-packets in Wireless Sensor Networks: Dynamics and Defense Implications [ pdf ]
Bo Sun, Dibesh Shrestha, Guanhua Yan, and Yang Xiao.
Proceedings of IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM'08), December 2008.
- BotTracer: Execution-Based Bot-Like Malware Detection [ pdf ]
Lei Liu, Songqing Chen, Guanhua Yan, and Zhao Zhang.
Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Information Security (ISC'08), September 2008.
- Dynamic Balancing of Packet Filtering Workloads on Distributed Firewalls [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Songqing Chen, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS'08), June 2008.
- Worm Propagation Dynamics in Wireless Sensor Networks [ pdf ]
Bo Sun, Guanhua Yan, and Yang Xiao.
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'08), May 2008.
- DDoS Mitigation in Non-Cooperative Environments [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of IFIP Networking (NETWORKING'08), May 2008.
- Catching instant messaging worms with change-point detection techniques [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Zhen Xiao, and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 1st Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET'08), April 2008.
2007
- Modeling Propagation Dynamics of Bluetooth Worms [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'07), June 2007.
- Bluetooth worm propagation: mobility pattern matters! [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan, Leticia Cuellar, Stephan Eidenbenz, Hector D. Flores, Nicolas Hengartner, and Vincent Vu.
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM symposium on Information, computer and communications security (ASIACCS'07), March 2007.
2006
- Bluetooth Worms: Models, Dynamics, and Defense Implications [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'06), December 2006.
- Sluggish Calendar Queues for Network Simulation [ pdf ]
Guanhua Yan and Stephan Eidenbenz.
Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'06), September 2006.
- Packet Reordering Metrics: Some Methodological Considerations [ pdf ]
Gabriel Istrate, Anders Hansson, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the International conference on Networking and Services (ICNS'06, Best Paper Award), July 2006.
- High-Performance Simulation of Low-Resolution Network Flows [ pdf ]
David M. Nicol and Guanhua Yan.
Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SIMULATION), 82(1), January 2006.
- RINSE: The Real-Time Immersive Network Simulation Environment for Network Security Exercises (Extended Version) [ pdf ]
Michael Liljenstam, Jason Liu, David M. Nicol, Yougu Yuan, Guanhua Yan, and Chris Grier.
Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SIMULATION), 82(1), January 2006.
2005
- Simulation of Network Traffic at Coarse Timescales [ pdf ]
David M. Nicol and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS'05, Best Paper Award), June 2005.
- RINSE: The Real-Time Immersive Network Simulation Environment for Network Security Exercises [ pdf ]
Michael Liljenstam, Jason Liu, David M. Nicol, Yougu Yuan, Guanhua Yan, and Chris Grier.
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS'05, Test of Time Award), June 2005.
2004
- Discrete event fluid modeling of background TCP traffic [ pdf ]
David M. Nicol and Guanhua Yan.
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), 14(3), July 2004.
2003
- Simulation of large scale networks I: simulation of large-scale networks using SSF [ pdf ]
David M. Nicol, Jason Liu, Michael Liljenstam, and Guanhua Yan.
Proceedings of the 35th conference on Winter Simulation (WSC'03), 14(3), December 2003.
Updated by Guanhua Yan on Sept. 1, 2014.