Xiang Li is an Associate Professor at the College of Cyber Science, Nankai University. He received his Ph.D. from Network and Information Security Lab (NISL) at Tsinghua University (advised by Professors Qi Li and Haixin Duan) in 2024. He was a visiting scholar at UC Irvine as a project specialist, working with Professor Zhou Li. Additionally, he is the author of the fast IPv6 network device scanner XMap, open-sourced on GitHub (370+ stars). He is also a member of the DataCon Expert Committee. He is the advisor of Nankai University’s CTF teams, an ACM member, CCF member, and CIC member. He serves as PC for top-tier venues like IMC 2025 and others like AsiaCCS 2025. His research interests include network security, protocol security, IPv6 security, DNS security, Internet measurement, network & protocol fuzzing, network vulnerability discovery & attack, web security, and underground economy with 18 research papers. As the first author, he has published many research papers at all top-tier security conferences, including Oakland S&P (2), USENIX Security (1), CCS (1), NDSS (1), and other conferences like DSN. As the corresponding author and co-author, he also published multiple papers in top conferences like USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, SIGMETRICS, and IMC. He also gets his presentations accepted by top industry security conferences like Black Hat (Asia, USA^2, and Europe). He likes to attend talks and workshops like IDS, OARC, and VehicleSec to share his research. He applied for 11 patents (1 authorized and 5 in checking as the first author). He has obtained over 200 CVE/CNVD/CNNVD vulnerability numbers for a variety of influential IPv6 and DNS vulnerabilities, which have impacted over 20 home router vendors and all DNS implementations and resolver vendors. He received acknowledgements and more than $17,100 rewards from those vendors, like Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Akamai; an Austria government CERT daily report; A Sweden government CERT weekly news; A Bournemouth University (BU) CERT news; 100+ news coverage by media such as BleepingComputer. He is working for the improvement of network protocols (related work has been referenced in RFC). He got multiple prizes, such as 2024 ACM SIGSAC China Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award (1st), 2024 Pwnie Award Nominations for Most Innovative Research (Hacker Oscar), 1st prize of IPv6 Technology Application Innovation Competition, 2nd prize of GeekCon 2023 DAF Contest, National Scholarship, Wang Dazhong Scholarship, Tsinghua Outstanding Scholarship, Outstanding Graduate, and Extraordinary Hacker of GeekCon International 2024. As the advisor or competition leader, he instructed the teamers to get the 2nd prize of 2024 Changcheng Cup and the 1st and 3rd prizes of 2024 Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Security Cup.
About openings: I am actively seeking self-motivated Master’s and PhD students, as well as intern researchers, who have a strong interest in network security and privacy, web security, vulnerability discovery, code analysis, reverse engineering, LLMs, and related fields. If you’re interested, please email me your resume. I apologize in advance if you don’t receive a response due to the high volume of inquiries. Thank you!
Recent News