UCSD CSE - Systems and Networking

Alex Gamero-Garrido (Ph.D. 2021) → NEU Postdoc
Rob McGuinness (Ph.D. 2021) → UCSD ECE Postdoc
Chengcheng Xiang (Ph.D. 2021)
Moein Khazraee (Ph.D. 2020) → MIT Postdoc
Guo "Vector" Li (Ph.D. 2020) → Google
Shelby Thomas (Ph.D. 2020) → Prysm
Louis DeKoven (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
Brown Farinholt (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
Zhaomo Yang (Ph.D. 2019) → Google
Max Mellette (Postdoc 2016-2019) → InFocus Networks
Joe DeBlasio (Ph.D. 2018) → Google
Arjun Roy (Ph.D. 2018) → Google

Brian Kantor (retired 2018) → ARDC

Stephan Chenette(M.S. 2021) → Co-Founder and CTO AttackIQ
Xuhao Luo (M.S. 2021) → UIUC Ph.D. program
Keerthana Ganesan (M.S. 2020) → Facebook
Brian Johannesmeyer → Vrije Universiteit Ph.D. program
Maxwell Bland (M.S. 2019) → University of Illinois Ph.D. program
Liz Izhikevich (M.S. 2018) → Stanford Ph.D. program
Rohit Kulkarni (M.S. 2018) → Qualcomm

Godwin Pang (B.S. 2021) → Confluent
Priyal Suneja (B.S. 2021) → UW Ph.D. program
Weiyang "Frank" Wang (B.S. 2020) → MIT Ph.D. program
Ansel Blume (B.S. 2019) → Amazon
→ University of Illinois Ph.D. program

[All Alumni]

Recent News

January 24— More great news – Stefan Savage received a Diamond Award from the University of Washington School of Engineering, an award which honors outstanding alumni who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering. Stefan received the Distinguished Achievement in Academia award for his signature style of work that "challenges traditional investigation methods and redefines academic approaches to network security, privacy and reliability". Congratulations Stefan!

January 10— Congratulations to Gautam Akiwate (and his co-authors) for being named as a winner of the Internet Research Task Force's Applied Networking Research Prize for his work characterizing a domain hijacking risk that is an accidental byproduct of undocumented operational practices between domain registrars and registries. Gautam's award marks the second year in a row that the group has received the prize (Audrey Randall received it last year). Let's keep the streak going!

December 11— Its been a long road, but after 14yrs, a bunch of jobs, founding and building up AttackIQ, the pandemic gave prodigal sysnet member Stephan Chenette the pause to finish his Masters with his master's thesis, "An Analysis Of Judgment Variability Amongst Cybersecurity Participants When Asked To Forecast Cybersecurity-related Events". A nice bit of work and proof that you can go home again. Congrats Stephan!

October 6— Today, the accepted paper list for the 2021 ACM Internet Measurement Conference was announced. Of the 55 papers to appear, more than 1 in 5 have UC San Diego authors -- a record (at least for us!) Seven were submitted by authors in the systems and networking group (and appear on this page), three had CAIDA authors, 1 was co-authored by UCSD undergrad Katherine Izhikevich (along with UCSD alumnus Liz Izhikevich), and one by (then CMU undergraduate and now sysnet Ph.D. student) Rukshani Athapathu. In addition, another four papers were written by UCSD Ph.D. or postdoc alumnus (Krishna Gummadi, Damon Mccoy and Yoshi Kohno). A very productive year! Congrats everyone and, in particular, congrats to our UCSD authors: Gautam Akiwate, Rukshani Athapathu, kc Claffy, Alberto Dainotti, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Katherine Izhikevich, Dhananjay Jagtap, Enze Liu, Alexander Marder, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Ariana Mirian, Ricky Mok, Audrey Randall, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Alex C. Snoeren, Alisha Ukani, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Huanlei Wu, Alex Yen, Zesen Zhang, and Hongyu Zou.

September 22— Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Daniel Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and the late Brian Kantor, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franzi Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno! Their landmark work on security vulnerabilities in modern automobiles was just awarded a 2021 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award honors research for which the results were unforeseen at the outset, but which ultimately led to major breakthroughs that have had significant societal impact. Read about the The Fast and the Curious and watch the wonderful video! As Charlize Theron famously quipped, "Hack them all". Indeed, Charlize. Indeed.

August 18— Congrats to Alex Gamero-Garrido, who defended his dissertation today on "Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems: Country-Specific Exposure of Internet Traffic". Alex will be starting as a Future Faculty Fellow (postdoc) at Northeastern University this fall.

July 14— Congrats to Gautam Akiwate and his collaborators for receiving the Best Paper award at the 2021 IEEE/IFP TMA Conference for their paper on characterizing Anycast adoption in DNS.

June 12— Congratulations to Priyal Suneja for receiving the CSE Department Student Award for Excellence for 2021! This award follows her other awards for Excellence in Service & Leadership in 2020 and Excellence in Contributions to Diversity in 2019, not to mention all of her leadership efforts for Women in Computing. Thanks Priyal for all of your hard work and devotion to everyone in the department! We wish you the best as you continue your journey in the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington.

June 2— The awards keep on rolling in! Today it was announced that Stefan Savage has received the 2021 Academic Senate Distinguished Research Award, which is awarded "for the ground-breaking research conducted by members of the UCSD faculty". This particular award comes with work, however: Stefan has to give a university-wide lecture on his research. Congratulations Stefan, and we all look forward to your lecture!

April 22— Congratulations to Stefan Savage for being elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences! The Academy celebrates excellence across every field of human endeavor "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." Being elected to the Academy is a tremendous honor and outstanding achievement. Way to go, Stefan!

[All News]

Recent Publications

Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices, Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Eliana Rodriguez Herrera, Héctor Rodrigo López Soto, Christian Dameff, Dinesh Bharadia, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2022.

Quantifying Nations' Exposure to Traffic Observation and Selective Tampering, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Esteban Carisimo, Shuai Hao, Bradley Huffaker, Alex C. Snoeren, and Alberto Dainottti, Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Virtual, March 2022.

IRR Hygiene In the RPKI Era, Ben Du, Gautam Akiwate, Thomas Krenc, Cecilia Testart, Alexander Marder, Bradley Huffaker, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc claffy, Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Virtual, March 2022.

Clio: A Hardware-Software Co-Designed Disaggregated Memory System, Zhiyuan Guo*, Yizhou Shan*, Xuhao Luo, Yutong Huang, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'22), February 2022. (* co-first authors).

Risky BIZness: Risks Derived from Registrar Name Management, Gautam Akiwate, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Who's Got Your Mail? Characterizing Mail Service Provider Usage, Enze Liu, Gautam Akiwate, Mattijs Jonker, Ariana Mirian, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Home is Where the Hijacking is: Understanding DNS Interception by Residential Routers, Audrey Randall, Enze Liu, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Gautam Akiwate, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Inferring Regional Access Network Topologies: Methods and Applications, Zesen Zhang, Alexander Marder, Ricky Mok, Bradley Huffaker, Matthew Luckie, kc Claffy, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Federated Infrastructure: Use, Patterns, and Insights from "The People's Network", Dhananjay Jagtap, Alexander Yen, Huanlei Wu, Aaron Schulman, and Pat Pannuto, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Identifying ASes of State-owned Internet operators, Esteban Carisimo, Alex Gamero-Garrido, Alex C. Snoeren, and Alberto Dainotti, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Locked-In during Lock-Down: Undergraduate Life on the Internet in a Pandemic, Alisha Ukani, Ariana Mirian, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Virtual, November 2021.

Characterization of Anycast Adoption in the DNS Authoritative Infrastructure, Raffaele Sommese, Gautam Akiwate, Mattijs Jonker, Giovane C. M. Moura, Marco Davids, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, kc Claffy, and Anna Sperotto, Proceedings of Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), September 2021. (Best Paper).

Hopper: Modeling and Detecting Lateral Movement, Grant Ho, Mayank Dhiman, Devdatta Akhawe, Vern Paxson, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and David Wagner, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2021.

Driving 2FA Adoption at Scale: Optimizing Two-Factor Authentication Notification Design Patterns, Maximillian Golla, Grant Ho, Marika Lohmus, Monica Pulluri, and Elissa M. Redmiles, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2021.

Jetset: Targeted Firmware Rehosting for Embedded Systems, Evan Johnson, Maxwell Bland, Yifei Zhu, Joshua Mason, Stephen Checkoway, Stefan Savage, and Kirill Levchenko, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2021.

Can Systems Explain Permissions Better? Understanding Users' Misperceptions under Smartphone Runtime Permission Model, Bingyu Shen, Lili Wei, Chengcheng Xiang, Yudong Wu, Mingyao Shen, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Xinxin Jin, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2021.

User-Defined Cloud, Yiying Zhang, Ardalan Amiri Sani, and Harry Xu, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-XVIII), Online Event, June 2021.

Century-Scale Smart Infrastructure, Dhananjay Jagtap, Nishant Bhaskar, and Pat Pannuto, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-XVIII), Online Event, June 2021.

In-network Contention Resolution for Disaggregated Memory, Stewart Grant and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless (WORDS), April 2021.

CoResident Evil: Covert Communications in the Cloud with Lambdas, Anil Yelam, Ariana Mirian, Keerthana Ganesan, Shibani Subbareddy, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Ljubljana, Solvenia, April 2021.

Clairvoyance: Inferring Blocklist Use on the Internet, Vector Guo Li, Gautam Akiwate, Kirill Levchenko, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Brandenburg, Germany, March 2021.

Inferring Cloud Interconnections: Validation, Geolocation, and Routing Behavior, Alex Marder, kc claffy, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Brandenburg, Germany, March 2021.

[All Publications]

Affiliations