𝄞 Jie Cao ⌘

I am the Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University, ON, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. Jianbing Ni. I obtained my M.Eng. (Academic) degree in Cyberspace Security in the School of Cyber Science and Engineering at Southeast University, Nanjing, China in 2024, where I was advised by Prof. Yuwei Xu. My current research interests include Secure and Robust AI-generated image watermarking (AI Security), network traffic analysis and its defense, and network intrusion detection.

• July, 2026: 🎉 I have successfully passed my PhD Comprehensive Exam 2 and become PhD Candidate, thanks to my wife Xin (Danielle) Shen, my supervisor. Prof. Jianbing Ni, and all my committee members.
• May, 2026: Our work was accepted by USENIX Security 2026 (CCF-A, Tier-1).
• 3 May, 2026: We got married!
• May, 2026: Our work was accepted by Journal of Information and Intelligence.
• 22 Feb, 2026: We are engaged. Fiance: Jie Cao, fiancee: Xin Shen!
• Jan, 2026: Our work was accepted by ICASSP 2026.
• Sep, 2025: 🎉 I have successfully passed my PhD Comprehensive Exam 1, thanks to my girlfriend Xin (Danielle) Shen, my supervisor. Prof. Jianbing Ni, and my committee.
• Sep, 2025: Our work was accepted by ICA3PP 2025.
• Jul, 2025: Our work was accepted by IEEE Global Communications Conference 2025.
• Mar, 2025: I was invited to serve on the technical program committee for IEEE AIoT 2025, Security, Trust, Privacy in AI and IoT Track.
• Nov, 2024: 🎉 I have been awarded the 2024 Jiangsu Cyberspace Security Association Outstanding Master's Thesis Award, and this thesis was completed under the supervision of Prof. Yuwei Xu.
• Sep, 2024: 😄 I started my PhD journey at Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University 🇨🇦, and my new life in Kingston.
• May, 2024: 🎉 I was honored Outstanding Master's Graduate of Southeast University.
• May, 2024: 🎉 I defend my master's thesis at Southeast Univeristy, thanks to my supervisor. Prof. Yuwei Xu.
• Oct, 2023: I was honored National Scholarship for Master Students from Ministry of Education of China (0.2%).
• Oct, 2023: I was honored Tri-merit Student Pioneer Honor Award (1%).
• Jun, 2023: I attend IEEE ICC'23:Communication QoS, Reliability and Modeling Symposium in Rome Italy.

CDRAS: Composite Distortion Robust Adaptive Steganography in Social Networks
Xinwei Zhang, Chengzhe Lai*, Jie Cao, Dong Zheng
Signal Processing (Under review).

A Content-Adaptive Steganographic Backdoor Attack Scheme for Lightweight Multi-Label Image Classification
Xinwei Zhang, Chengzhe Lai*, Jie Cao, Yanran Liu, Dong Zheng
Journal of Communication, Chinese (Under review).

MarkNull: Model-Agnostic Watermark Removal in AI-Generated Images via On-Manifold Latent Manipulation
Jie Cao, Qi Li, Zelin Zhang, Xiaodong Wu, Lingshuang Liu, Xiangman Li, Jianbing Ni*
The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'26).

From AI-Generated Content to Agentic Action: Security and Safety Threats in Generative AI
Zelin Zhang, Qi Li, Jie Cao, Lingshuang Liu, Jianbing Ni*
Journal of Information and Intelligence.

Secure and Robust Watermarking for AI-generated Images: A Comprehensive Survey
Jianbing Ni¹, Jie Cao^1,*, Qi Li, Zeling Zhang, Rongxing Lu, Xuemin (Sherman) Shen
Engineering (Major revision).

MarkSweep: A No-Box Removal Attack On AI-Generated Image Watermarking Via Noise Intensification And Frequency-Aware Denoising
Jie Cao, Zeling Zhang, Qi Li, Jianbing Ni*
2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

OnionAdapt: Cross-Domain Few-Shot Website Fingerprinting Attack from Surface Sites to Onion Services
Yuwei Xu*, Xinhe Fan, Zhengxin Xu, Jie Cao, Qiao Xiang, Guang Cheng
Computer & Security (Major revision).

PacketPatch: Practical Generation and Deployment of Adversarial Packets for Byte-Feature-Based Encrypted Traffic Classification
Yuwei Xu*, Yuanyuan Xu, Jiahui Chen, Kehui Song, Jie Cao, Qiao Xiang, Guang Cheng
Computer & Security.

PacketMorph: Generation of Recoverable Adversarial Packets Against Encrypted Traffic Classification via Class-Wise Universal Perturbation
Yuanyuan Xu, Yuwei Xu*, Yunpeng Bai, Jie Cao, Kehui Song, Guang Cheng
International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP), 2025.

Perturbing Vulnerable Bytes in Packets to Generate Adversarial Samples Resisting DNN-Based Traffic Monitoring
Jie Cao, Zhengxin Xu, Yunpeng Bai, Yuwei Xu*, Qiao Xiang, Guang Cheng
2024 IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)

Tarnhelm: Using Adversarial Samples to Protect User Privacy Against Traffic Identification
Yuwei Xu*, Yunpeng Bai, Jie Cao, Yuanyuan Xu, Liang He, Guang Cheng
20th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), Second Cycle, 2024.

OnionPeeler: A Novel Input-Enriched Website Fingerprinting Attack on Tor Onion Services
Zhengxin Xu, Jie Cao, Yujie Hou, Yuwei Xu*, Guang Cheng
20th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), First Cycle, 2024.

TorHunter: A Lightweight Method for Efficient Identification of Obfuscated Tor Traffic Through Unsupervised Pre-training
Yuwei Xu*, Zhengxin Xu, Jie Cao, Rongrong Wang, Yali Yuan, Guang Cheng
The 2024 International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS), 2024.

GateKeeper: An UltraLite Malicious Traffic Identification Method with Dual-aspect Optimization Strategies on IoT Gateways
Jie Cao, Yuwei Xu*, Enze Yu, Qiao Xiang, Kehui Song, Liang He, Guang Cheng.
Computer Networks, Volume 250, 2024, 110556.

Cerberus: Efficient OSPS Traffic Identification through Multi-Task Learning
Yuwei Xu*, Xiaotian Fang, Jie Cao, Rou Yu, Kehui Song, Guang Cheng.
IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2023.

FastTraffic: A Lightweight Method for Encrypted Traffic Fast Classification
Yuwei Xu*, Jie Cao, Kehui Song, Qiao Xiang, Guang Cheng.
Computer Networks, Volume 235, 2023, 109965.

L-ETC: A Lightweight Model Based on Key Bytes Selection for Encrypted Traffic Classification
Jie Cao, Yuwei Xu*, Qiao Xiang
IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2023.

DataJudge: Cross-chain Data Consistency Verification Based on Extended Merkle Hash Tree
Yuwei Xu*, Shengjiang Dai, Junyu Zeng, Jie Cao, Ran He, Guang Cheng
24th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP), 2024.

ChainSafari: A General and Efficient Blockchain Verifiable Query Scheme with Real-Time Synchronization
Yuwei Xu*, Junyu Zeng, Jie Cao, Shengjiang Dai, Qiao Xiang, Guang Cheng
24th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP), 2024.

DarkTrans: A Blockchain-based Covert Communication Scheme with High Channel Capacity and Strong Concealment
Yuwei Xu*, Zehui Wu, Jie Cao, Jingdong Xu, Guang Cheng
IEEE 29th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), 2023.

ChainPass: A Privacy-preserving Complete Cross-chain Authentication for Consortium Blockchains
Yuwei Xu*, Yin Zhang, Haonan Shi, Jie Cao.
IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2023.

HyFIDS: Hybrid Frequency-Aware Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Internet of Vehicles
Jie Cao, Zelin Zhang, Jianbing Ni, Mohammad Zulkernine
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeCom), 2025.

A Secure and Lightweight Data Sharing Scheme in Vehicular Digital Twin Network
Guanjie Li, Tom H Luan*, Jinkai Zheng, Dihao Hu, Jie Cao, Yalun Wu
Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, Volume 18, pages 1–17, 2025.

R-manager: Consortium Blockchain-based Vehicle Reputation Management for High-quality Reports in Traffic-oriented Crowdsourcing
Enze Yu, Yuwei Xu*, Lin Gao, Jie Cao, Qiao Xiang, Liang He
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2024.

SPIR: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Incentive Scheme for Reliable Real-Time Map Updates
Chengzhe Lai*, Min Zhang, Jie Cao, Dong Zheng
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1, pp.416-428, 2020.

Securing traffic-related messages exchange against inside-and-outside collusive attack in vehicular networks
Jingyu Feng, Nan Liu, Jie Cao, Yuqing Zhang, Guangyue Lu*
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Volume 6, Issue 6, pp.9979-9992, 2019.

A bilingual multi-type spam detection model based on M-BERT
Jie Cao, Chengzhe Lai*
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeCom), 2020.

A Cross-Domain Adaptive Few-Shot Website Fingerprinting Recognition Method for the Tor Network
Yuwei Xu, Zhengxing Xu, Jie Cao, Yunpeng Bai, Yali Yuan, Guang Cheng
Chinese Patent, CN2024109025281.

A Lightweight Encrypted Traffic Fast Identification Method for Network Management Devices
Jie Cao, Yuwei Xu, Xinyu Fan, Zhiyuan Liang, Guang Cheng.
Chinese Patent, CN2023107490513.

A Multi-domain Hidden Service Website Fingerprinting Attack Method Based on Attention Mechanism
Yuwei Xu, Huabin Yang, Zhengxin Xu, Jie Cao, Yali Yuan, Guang Cheng.
Chinese Patent, CN2023103946940.

A Cross-chain Supervision Method for Blockchain Based on Shared Nodes
Yuwei Xu, Jie Cao, Yi Sun, Huan Xu, Zehui Wu, Yujian Zhang,Guang Cheng.
Chinese Patent, ZL 2022 1 0517896.5.

Sep. 2024 - Jun. 2028 (excepted): PhD student of ECE; Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Smith Engineering, Queen's University, Canada. (Supervisor: Prof. Jianbing Ni)

Sep. 2021 - Jun. 2024: M.Eng. (Academic) of Cyberspace Security; Dept. of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China. (Supervisor: Prof. Yuwei Xu)

Jul. 2020 - Aug. 2021: GAP Year, originally pursued a M.Eng degree at New York University in the United States.

Sep. 2016 - Jun. 2020: B.S. of Information Security; Dept. of Cyberspace Security, Xi'an University of Posts & Telecommunications, China. (Supervisor: Prof. Chengzhe Lai and Prof. Jingyu Feng)

Jan. 2025 - Apr. 2025: Teaching Assistant, ELEC 373: Computer Networks (Undergraduate Course), Queen's University.

Sep. 2021 - Jan. 2022: Teaching Assistant, Computer Network and Security (Undergraduate Course), Southeast University.

Sep. 2018 - Jan. 2019: Teaching Assistant, Operating System (Undergraduate Course), Xi'an University of Posts & Telecommunications.

TPC Member: International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), 2026.

TPC Member: International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), 2025.

PC Member: IEEE Annual Congress on Artificial Intelligence of Things (IEEE AIoT), 2025.

PC Member: 18th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS), 2024.

Reviewer: Information Fusion, 2026.

Reviewer: IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, 2026.

Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security , 2026.

Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, 2026.

Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2026.

Reviewer: Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice , 2026.

Reviewer: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2025.

Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2025, 2026.

Reviewer: Security and Safety, 2025, 2026.

Reviewer: IEEE Systems Journal, 2025.

Reviewer: Computer Networks, 2025, 2026.

Reviewer: Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 2024, 2025, 2026.

Reviewer: Cybersecurity, 2024, 2026.

Reviewer: Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust , 2025.

Reviewer: EAI SecureComm, 2024.