Peng Gao
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Office: Gilbert Place 4104
E-mail: penggao [at] vt [dot] edu
Follow @penggaotweets
Publications | Lab | Teaching | Awards | Services
About Me
I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley (with Dawn Song). I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University (with Prateek Mittal, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni). I received my B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
I am broadly interested in security and privacy, systems and networking, and AI. My research mainly focuses on creating scalable, intelligent, secure, and trustworthy systems and technologies to solve real-world security, privacy, and computing challenges. The following are some topics that my lab currently focuses on:
- Cyber attack (e.g., APTs) prevention, detection, investigation, and response; cyber threat intelligence
- Programmable network security with P4 switches and eBPF; security for future network architectures and designs
- LLMs for security; LLMs safety and governance; LLM agents
- AI for science (e.g., molecular/materials property prediction and design)
Prospective students: I am looking to recruit self-motivated Ph.D. students, as well as M.S. and undergraduate students, to join my lab and work on exciting projects in system/network security and LLMs for security. If you are interested in working with me, please email your CV and transcript to penggao.jobs [at] gmail [dot] com. For Ph.D. applicants, please note that priority will be given to those with whom we have prior collaborations. Therefore, if you are interested in joining us, I encourage you to reach out early so we can explore potential initial collaborations.
Education & Experience
- 2013-2019: Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
- 2013-2015: M.A. in Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
- 2009-2013: B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- 01/2012-05/2012: Exchange student at the University of Hong Kong
- 06/2019-04/2021: Postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley
- 01/2019-06/2019: Visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley
- 06/2018-09/2018: Research intern at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing
- 06/2017-09/2017: Software engineering intern at Facebook, Menlo Park
- 10/2016-12/2016: Research intern at NEC Laboratories America, Princeton
- 11/2015-01/2016: Research intern at NEC Laboratories America, Princeton
- 06/2015-09/2015: Research intern at Microsoft Research, Redmond
Lab News
- 06/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of USENIX Security 2026.
- 06/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of AsiaCCS 2026.
- 03/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of NDSS 2026.
- 03/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of PETS 2026.
- 03/2025: Award Ph.D. students Saimon Amanuel Tsegai, Yutong Cheng, Jianan Nie, and M.S. student Rizky Ramadhana P. K. received the 2025 CCI Cyber Innovation Scholarship. Congratulations to Saimon, Yutong, Jianan, and Rizky!
- 03/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of ACSAC 2025.
- 03/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of IEEE S&P 2026.
- 03/2025: Service Dr. Peng Gao will co-organize the 2nd DMV Security Workshop.
- 03/2025: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2025 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Innovation: Ideation to Commercialization Award (PI).
- 02/2025: Paper We released a new AI4Science preprint, "ReGNet: Reciprocal Space-Aware Long-Range Modeling and Multi-Property Prediction for Crystals". We leverage reciprocal space to effectively encode long-range interactions and introduce a mixture-of-experts (MoE) approach for multi-property prediction in crystals.
- 02/2025: Paper Our paper "CTINexus: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models" was accepted to Euro S&P 2025.
- 12/2024: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2024 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Cybersecurity for AI and AI for Cybersecurity Research Award (PI).
- 12/2024: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2024 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Cybersecurity for AI and AI for Cybersecurity Research Award (Co-PI).
- 11/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of DLSP 2025.
- 10/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of CCS 2025.
- 10/2024: Conference Ph.D. student Yutong Cheng attended the 31st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS).
- 09/2024: Award Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber received the 2024 Davenport Leadership Fellowship. Congratulations to Osama!
- 09/2024: Award Ph.D. student Yutong Cheng received the 2024 Bitshares Fellowship. Congratulations to Yutong!
- 09/2024: Other Dr. Peng Gao was invited to the FTC roundtable session at the 2024 SaTC PI Meeting to present our P4Control work.
- 08/2024: Paper Our paper "Madeline: Continuous and Low-cost Monitoring with Graph-free Representations to Combat Cyber Threats" was accepted to ACSAC 2024.
- 08/2024: Paper Our paper "ThreatKG: An AI-Powered System for Automated Open-Source Cyber Threat Intelligence Gathering and Management" was accepted to LAMPS 2024.
- 07/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of AsiaCCS 2025.
- 07/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of Euro S&P 2025.
- 06/2024: Paper Our paper "vFix: Facilitating Software Maintenance of Smart Contracts via Automatically Fixing Vulnerabilities" was accepted to ICSME 2024.
- 05/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of NDSS 2025.
- 05/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of LAMPS 2024.
- 05/2024: Conference Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber attended the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P).
- 04/2024: Award VT undergraduate student Sriram Narlapati received the 2024 Fincantieri Scholarship to undertake a summer internship in our lab. Congratulations to Sriram!
- 04/2024: Award Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber received the highly-competitive IEEE S&P 2024 Student Travel Grant. Only two VT students were selected. Congratulations to Osama!
- 04/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of PETS 2025.
- 04/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of IEEE S&P 2025.
- 04/2024: Award Ph.D. students Yutong Cheng and Osama Bajaber received the 2024 CCI Cyber Innovation Scholarship. Congratulations to Yutong and Osama!
- 03/2024: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) support for the 2024 Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program (MAOP) Summer Research Internship program (Sole PI).
- 03/2024: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2024 Virginia Tech Proof-of-Concept Grant (PI).
- 03/2024: Service Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber will serve on the Poster Program Committee of IEEE S&P 2024. Congratulations to Osama!
- 03/2024: Paper Our paper "P4Control: Line-Rate Cross-Host Attack Prevention via In-Network Information Flow Control Enabled by Programmable Switches and eBPF" was accepted to IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2024.
- 03/2024: Paper Our paper "An Analysis of Recent Advances in Deepfake Image Detection in an Evolving Threat Landscape" was accepted to IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2024.
- 03/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will co-organize the 1st DMV Security Workshop.
- 02/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of ACSAC 2024.
- 01/2024: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of DLSP 2024.
- 12/2023: Conference Ph.D. student Jianan Nie attended the 37th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
- 12/2023: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of ACM CCS 2024.
- 10/2023: Service Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber will serve on the Program Committee of ICICS 2024. Congratulations to Osama!
- 08/2023: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2023 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Cybersecurity Research Award (Co-PI).
- 08/2023: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of Euro S&P 2024.
- 08/2023: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2023 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Innovation: Ideation to Commercialization Award (PI).
- 07/2023: Award Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber received the 2023 Bitshares Fellowship. Congratulations to Osama!
- 06/2023: Paper Our paper "PrivMon: A Stream-Based System for Real-Time Privacy Attack Detection for Machine Learning Models" was accepted to RAID 2023.
- 06/2023: Service Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber will serve on the Artifact Evaluation Committee of NDSS 2024. Congratulations to Osama!
- 05/2023: Conference Ph.D. students Osama Bajaber and Jianan Nie attended the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P).
- 05/2023: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2023 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Research Engagement Award (PI).
- 04/2023: Award Ph.D. student Jianan Nie received the highly-competitive IEEE S&P 2023 Student Travel Grant. Only two VT students were selected. Congratulations to Jianan!
- 03/2023: Service Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber will serve on the Poster Program Committee of IEEE S&P 2023. Congratulations to Osama!
- 03/2023: Award Ph.D. students Osama Bajaber and Jianan Nie received the 2023 CCI Cyber Innovation Scholarship. Congratulations to Osama and Jianan!
- 02/2023: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2023 4-VA Collaborative Research Award for Pre-Tenure Faculty (Sole PI).
- 12/2022: Service Dr. Peng Gao will serve on the Technical Program Committee of ACM CCS 2023.
- 11/2022: Conference Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber attended the 30th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).
- 10/2022: Award Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber received the IEEE ICNP 2022 Travel Grant. Congratulations to Osama!
- 08/2022: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2022 Amazon - Virginia Tech Initiative Faculty Research Award (PI).
- 08/2022: Conference Ph.D. student Osama Bajaber attended the 31st USENIX Security Symposium.
- 01/2022: Paper Our paper "A Knowledge Base Question Answering System for Cyber Threat Knowledge Acquisition" was accepted to ICDE 2022 Demonstrations Track.
- 12/2021: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2021-22 VT New Faculty Mentoring Grant (Sole PI).
- 11/2021: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2021 4-VA Collaborative Research Award (PI).
- 10/2021: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2021 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Cybersecurity Research Collaboration Award (PI).
- 10/2021: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2021 Cisco Research Award (Sole PI).
- 10/2021: Paper Our paper "PrivGuard: Privacy Regulation Compliance Made Easier" was accepted to USENIX Security 2022.
- 08/2021: Paper Our paper "Back-Propagating System Dependency Impact for Attack Investigation" was accepted to USENIX Security 2022.
- 07/2021: Funding Dr. Peng Gao received the 2021 Google Cloud Research Credits Award (Sole PI).
- 05/2021: Paper Our paper "Make Web3.0 Connected" was accepted to IEEE TDSC.