but I did not find Cao Jie's name or contact cited as either an author
or referenced. However, its similar enough to suggest there might be a
relationship.
···
On 2026-04-25 15:13:30, David Fifield via tor-project wrote:
The National Key R&D Program (国家重点研发计划) is a major
national-level research funding program in China since 2016.
The National Key R&D Program, and specific grant numbers thereof, are
frequently acknowledged in research papers. But finding information
beyond the grant numbers is difficult. There's no central public source
of grant metadata such as the title, the name of the principal
investigator, the start and end dates, and the funding amount. MERICS
has published at least one report with aggregate statistics about Key
R&D projects (https://merics.org/en/report/controlling-innovation-chain#2-research-projects-getting-scientists-to-deliver-11538)
but apparently the sources of data they used are no longer available.
But sometimes information about grants gets out through other sources.
An example is grant number 2023YFB3106700, which appears in the CV of a
researcher named Cao Jie with start and end dates that the English title
"Research on Generalized Security Theory for Dark Web Suppression".
Research on Generalized Security Theory for Dark Web Suppression
Nov. 2013 – Dec. 2024
Researcher, National Key R&D Program of China (Key Special Program), Grant No. 2023YFB3106700
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Cheng Guang is also a meta-PI over many Key R&D projects as top cybersecurity dean of SEU and infosec subject matter expert for the “十四五” (China’s five-year national development plan):
His research networks / supervision appear fairly broad (he is a professor, after all), but much of the research does seem to be highly focused in this area. Aside from Key R&D, there is a lot of funding from NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China) and provincial funding from Jiangsu. Not hugely surprising, considering how crucial these programs are for computer science funding in China in general (esp NSFC). For specific grant numbers, you want to look for 基金项目 on CNKI or in conference listings (NSFC is like 62xxetc for “information science” and 61xxetc for older ICT grants).
In China, juicier grants are available via Cyberspace Administration of China or the Ministry of Public Security, which sometimes get listed in a final report/article/talk as 横向项目 or 横向项目.
Other fun grant programs for senior infosec researchers: 江苏省重点研发计划 (key r&d but regional for Jiangsu) , 江苏省自然科学基金 , 教育部重点实验室 (Key R&D but primarily institutional), 万人计划 , 333工程 (these last two might not be as relevant for your search but are worth noting in this context).
Anyway, tangent, both of the grants you listed seem to be in the same program cluster. I would bet that you could map out much of their research network starting with Cheng Guang, Cao Jie, and Wu Hua, and then just look at the funding acknowledgements of the relevant papers to confirm research focus of the grants.
On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 10:54:33AM -0400, Micah Anderson wrote:
> On 2026-04-25 15:13:30, David Fifield via tor-project wrote:
> >> Research on Generalized Security Theory for Dark Web Suppression
> >> Nov. 2013 – Dec. 2024
> >> Researcher, National Key R&D Program of China (Key Special Program), Grant No. 2023YFB3106700
>
> I thought maybe this research was related to
> [https://jsuese.scu.edu.cn/en/article/doi/10.12454/j.jsuese.202400800/](https://jsuese.scu.edu.cn/en/article/doi/10.12454/j.jsuese.202400800/)
> but I did not find Cao Jie's name or contact cited as either an author
> or referenced. However, its similar enough to suggest there might be a
> relationship.
That one, "Towards a Universal Security Framework for Darknet
Suppression: Conceptual Foundations and Future Prospects" also
acknowledges from the National Key R&D Program (which is not notable in
itself, the program issues a lot of grants). The grant number is
different (2023YFB3106600), but pretty close to the other one
(2023YFB3106700); I would guess they they were awarded at about the same
time. It's possible that different institutions have different grants on
similar topics.
2023YFB3106600
2023YFB3106700
Searching for 2023YFB3106600 turns up some other publications:
"CTS-OD: a cascaded two-stage framework for high-throughput Obfs4 detection"
Huang Yutong, Zhang Qiang, Huang Cheng
Cybersecurity, 2026.
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42400-025-00492-0](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42400-025-00492-0)
"Seeing Through .onion: Multimodal Information Extraction and Category Discovery in Tor Markets"
Chen Zhouguo, Wang Chunmian, Ren Leran, Yang Ming
International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, 2026.
[https://fyust.edu.cn/gjhyqk/cscwd2026/papers/paper_1036.pdf](https://fyust.edu.cn/gjhyqk/cscwd2026/papers/paper_1036.pdf)
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I was not aware that there were so many research papers being published publicly, in English, at from what I can guess are legit, well-known but perhaps not top-tier journals and conferences? Do you wind up changing anything in the protocols or the implementations based on what they find?