A facile facet reconfiguration has been considered as an essential issue for nitride coating in promoting surface protection behaviour. Compared to physical-chemical methods to achieve heterogeneous coating, plasma nitridation strategy is regarded as a favourable technique to in-situ deliver nitride protecting layer, but it is difficult to precisely control surface framework through plasma technique due to complicated interaction environment. To simply achieve nitride coating with favourable surface protection behaviour, we design a novel auxiliary insulator-confined plasma system to directly achieve hydrophobic iron nitride nano-coral (hFeNC) with desirable corrosion- and wear-resistant properties by controlling surface heating process during plasma nitridation. The resultant hFeNC nano-framework delivers corrosion rate of 1.2 mpy, 4- and 9-times lower than that of solid iron nitride film (sFeN) via normal plasma and initial Fe in NaCl condition, respectively. Operando plasma diagnostics along with numerical simulation further confirm the effect of surface heating on typical plasma parameters as well as the iron nitride nano-frameworks, indicating surface heating as the key factor responsible for the favourable surface protection coating.