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 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 Video (ANRP)

@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,
}