Tianyi Gao

I am Tianyi Gao (高天怡), a PhD student in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Michio Honda. I received MSc in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh in 2022 with Class Prize. I interned under Prof. Guangyu Sun at the Advanced Institute of Information Technology (AIIT), Peking University in 2020.

My research interests lie in designing high-performance and secure datacenter networking systems. I am currently working on SMT (S&P’26; ANRP), a datacenter transport protocol with transport-level encryption. SMT is designed as a generic, secure transport that can provide TLS-level security properties while maintaining low latency and high throughput for a wide range of datacenter applications. I have also contributed to XO (NSDI’26), a novel proxy architecture which offloads application request processing from Layer 7 with techniques including connection migration, server direct return (DSR), and TC hardware offload.

I am a recipient of the IETF / IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP).

I am always open to discussions and collaborations on research and open-source projects, please reach out!

news

Mar 12, 2026	I will intern in at Bellevue (Seattle) during 2026 summer!
Mar 05, 2026	I will intern in at London during 2026 autumn!
Jan 14, 2026	🏆 Awarded the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2026!
Dec 10, 2025	XO is accepted to USENIX NSDI 2026!
Sep 09, 2025	SMT is accepted to IEEE Security & Privacy (Oakland) 2026!
Apr 22, 2025	SMT and XO are accepted to APNet 2025!

selected publications

S&P/Oakland’26

Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks

Tianyi Gao, Xinshu Ma, Suhas Narreddy, Eugenio Luo, Steven W. D. Chien, and Michio Honda

To Appear at May 2026
🏆 Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2026

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{smtsp26,
  author = {Gao, Tianyi and Ma, Xinshu and Narreddy, Suhas and Luo, Eugenio and Chien, Steven W. D. and Honda, Michio},
  title = {{ Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks }},
  booktitle = { 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) },
  year = {2026},
  volume = {},
  issn = {2375-1207},
  pages = {1502-1519},
  keywords = {security;transport protocol;datacenter},
  doi = {10.1109/SP63933.2026.00080},
  url = {https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/SP63933.2026.00080},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
  month = may,
}

NSDI’26

Remote TCP Connection Offload and Applications

Shuo Li^*, Steven W. D. Chien^*, Tianyi Gao, and Michio Honda

To Appear at May 2026

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{xonsdi26,
  author = {Li, Shuo and Chien, Steven W. D. and Gao, Tianyi and Honda, Michio},
  title = {Remote TCP Connection Offload and Applications},
  booktitle = {23rd {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation ({NSDI} 26)},
  pages = {to appear},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  month = may,
}

APNet’25

Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks

Tianyi Gao, Xinshu Ma, Suhas Narreddy, Eugenio Luo, Steven W. D. Chien, and Michio Honda

SP’26 version updates this paper

DOI
APNet’25

Remote TCP Connection Offload with XO

Shuo Li^*, Steven W.D. Chien^*, Tianyi Gao, and Michio Honda

NSDI’26 version updates this paper

DOI