Rate My Professor Mingkui Wei

Mingkui Wei is an associate professor in the Department of Cyber Security Engineering at George Mason University. He joined the university in January 2021 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in August 2023. Prior to this, Wei served as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Sam Houston State University from August 2016 to December 2020. Before entering academia, he worked as a First Office Application Engineer at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, from March 2008 to May 2011. Wei earned his PhD in Computing Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2016, where he also served as a research and teaching assistant from 2011 to 2016. He received his MS in Information Systems from Southeast University in China in 2008 and completed his undergraduate studies at Nanjing University of Science and Technology from 2001 to 2005.

Wei's current research interests center on network security, particularly at the application layer, web application security, and computer networks. He employs mathematical modeling and analysis, simulation and experimentation, and machine learning techniques to identify and mitigate security threats on the Internet. His work also extends to interdisciplinary applications of computer science in law enforcement and forensic investigation. Previously, Wei focused on cyber-physical system security and reliability, including Smart Grid communications and Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has published extensively in top-tier venues such as IEEE INFOCOM, USENIX Security, and ACM CCS. Notable publications include "Greenbench: A Benchmark for Observing Power Grid Vulnerability under Data-Centric Threats" (IEEE INFOCOM, 2014), "Domain Shadowing: Leveraging Content Delivery Networks for Robust Blocking-Resistant Communications" (USENIX Security, 2021), "Warmonger: Inflicting Denial-of-Service via Serverless Functions in the Cloud" (ACM CCS, 2021), "Perils of Wi-Fi Spoofing Attack Via Geolocation API and Its Defense" (IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2024), and "Shared Resource Entanglement Attacks against Serverless Computing" (IEEE CNS, 2024). Wei has served on technical program committees for IEEE INFOCOM (2017-2020), ICC (2019-2020), and Globecom (2019), acted as a guest editor for the Sensors journal, and participated as a founding member of the IEEE SIG on Intelligent Internet Edge. He has also secured multiple grants supporting research in web security, cloud denial-of-service attacks, machine learning for forensics, and cybersecurity education.