UCSD CSE - Systems and Networking

Shelby Thomas (Ph.D. 2020) → Prysm
Moein Khazraee (Ph.D. 2020) → MIT Postdoc
Guo "Vector" Li (Ph.D. 2020) → Google
Zhaomo Yang (Ph.D. 2019) → Google
Louis DeKoven (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
Brown Farinholt (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
Max Mellette (Postdoc 2016-2019) → InFocus Networks
Joe DeBlasio (Ph.D. 2018) → Google
Arjun Roy (Ph.D. 2018) → Google

Brian Kantor (retired 2018) → ARDC

Tianyin Xu (Ph.D. 2017) → University of Illinois
Danny Huang (Ph.D. 2017) → Princeton (postdoc) → NYU Poly
Xinxin Jin (Ph.D. 2017) → Whova

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

Karthik Balasubramaniam (M.S. 2017) → Amazon
Keerthana Ganesan (M.S. 2020) → Facebook

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

August 16— IMC 2020 paper acceptances are now public and, of the 53 papers accepted, five are from UCSD and another five are from UCSD alumni. Congrats to Gautam Akiwate, Audrey Randall, Enze Liu, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Stefan Savage, Geoff Voelker and Aaron Schulman from CSE, Alexander Marder, Alberto Dainotti and kc Claffy from CAIDA, and our alumns (Chris Kanich, Yoshi Kohno, Yuvraj Agarwal, Liz Izhikievich and Damon McCoy). Particular congrats to Gautam who had three papers accepted this round!

June 10— Congrats to Guo "Vector" Li, who defended his dissertation today on "An Empirical Analysis on Threat Intelligence: Data Characteristic and Real-World Uses". Vector will be joining Google to work on cloud security with our old collaborator, Chris Grier.

May 22— Congrats to Moein Khazraee! Moein defended his dissertation, "Reducing Development Cost for Customized Hardware Accleration in the Cloud Infrastructure", today and will soon start his postdoc at MIT.

May 18— Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Danny 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 study of the vulnerability of modern automobiles was awarded the 2020 IEEE Security & Privacy Test of Time Award. Read more about their efforts around their seminal work.

March 12— Congratulations to Nadia Heninger and her collaborators for setting a new factoring record by being the first to factor the RSA-250 prime in the RSA factoring challenge.

February 25— Congratulations to Mohammad Al-Fares, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Barath Raghavan, Nelson Huang and Amin Vahdat for winning the the NSDI Test-of-Time award! Their paper, Hedera: Dynamic Flow Schedule for Data Center Networks, was published ten years ago and is part of the group's legacy of leading data center networking research. Ten years later, the authors are doing well. Mohammad is at Google along with Engineering Fellow and Vice President Amin Vahdat, Siva is at Forward Networks and Barath is on the faculty at USC. UCSD has quite a history with this award and four out of the last five years have seen NSDI Test-of-Time awards given to papers with one or more UCSD authors.

February 7— Congratulations to Yiying Zhang who was awarded a VMware Early Career Faculty Grant!

January 8— Each year, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) awards the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship to one or more students for their academic commitment, particularly in networked systems, and their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. This year the scholarship was awarded to both Giselle Mejia and another undergraduate who wishes to remain anonymous. Congrats to both winners!

Ariana Mirian Inclusive Excellence Award

December 16— Congrats to Ariana Mirian who was named the campuswide student recipient of the UC San Diego Inclusive Excellence Award. The award recognizes those faculty, staff, students, departments and organizations who have made outstanding contributions in support of UC San Diego's commitment to inclusive excellence and diversity.

November 21— It is with great sadness that we learned today that Brian Kantor has passed away. Brian worked in the systems and networking group for the last decade before his retirement in 2018. You'll see his name on the automotive and voting security papers we published and the reality is that much of the work we did benefited from his ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat when we needed one. But CSE was only a small part of his time here at UCSD. Brian was truly an institution and had been at UCSD for 47 years. He was the University postmaster, he ran the name servers and he helped run network infrastructure. For those old enough to remember rlogin — he wrote the protocol. Ditto for the NNTP protocol that Netnews was based on. He was a nationally known ham radio operator and also co-founded and managed AMPRnet (the amateur radio packet network) which also became a critical research resource both here in CSE and at CAIDA. Brian was a unique personality and didn't naturally fit within bureaucracies, but he was eager to teach to those who wanted to learn, had a sharp wit and was an implacable advocate for doing the right thing. We were lucky to have had the time we had with him.

November 13— A while back, CSE alumni Tom Ristenpart, Hovav Shacham and Stefan Savage (and co-author Eran Tromer) published one of the first cloud security papers called "Hey You Get Off Of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third Party Clouds". Ten years and a couple thousand citations later, the paper has been named this year's winner of the ACM CCS Test of Time Award. The award recognizes papers from CCS ten years prior that have had the greatest impact on security research and practice over the past decade. Congrats to Tom, Hovav and Stefan! (and a particular congrats to Hovav who has now won TWO of these awards!)

September 27— kc claffy was named one of this year's 11 inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame! While formally recognized for her own "pioneering work in Internet analysis and measurement", we all know that the datasets CAIDA (which she founded in 1997 and directs to this day) produces underly a large fraction of not only SysNet's publication list, but the networking community's at large. We’re not worthy!

September 5— Congrats to Zhaomo Yang, who defended his dissertation today on "Compilers and Software Security: Opportunities and Challenges". He will be joining Google shortly.

[All News]

Recent Publications

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.

Enabling Active Networking on RMT Hardware, Rajdeep Das and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XIX), Chicago, IL, November 2020.

Unresolved Issues: Prevalence, Persistence and Perils of Lame Nameservers, Gautam Akiwate, Raffaele Sommese, Mattijs Jonker, Ian Foster, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (via the Internet), October 2020.

Trufflehunter: Cache Sniffing Rare Domains at Large Public DNS Resolvers, Audrey Randall, Enze Liu, Gautam Akiwate, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (via the Internet), October 2020.

MAnycast2 -- Using Anycast to Measure Anycast: Challenges and Opportunities, Raffaele Sommese, Gautam Akiwate, Leandro Bertholdo, Mattijs Jonker, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Alberto Dainotti, kc Claffy, and Anna Sperotto, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (via the Internet), October 2020.

Particle: Ephemeral Endpoints for Serverless Networking, Shelby Thomas, Lixiang Ao, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and George Porter, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), October 2020.

SmartNIC Performance Isolation with FairNIC: Programmable Networking for the Cloud, Stewart Grant, Anil Yelam, Maxwell Bland, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, New York, NY, August 2020. (The first two authors contributed equally).

PracExtractor: Extracting Configuration Good Practices from Manuals to Detect Server Misconfigurations, Chengcheng Xiang, Haochen Huang, Andrew Yoo, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Shankar Pasupathy, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 2020.

Disaggregating Persistent Memory and Controlling Them Remotely: An Exploration of Passive Disaggregated Key-Value Stores, Shin-Yeh Tsai, Yizhou Shan, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 2020.

Understanding Memory and Thread Safety Practices and Issues in Real-World Rust Programs, Boqin Qin, Yilun Chen, Zeming Yu, Linhai Song, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI), June 2020. (The first two authors contributed equally).

Corundum: An Open-Source 100-Gbps NIC, Alex Forencich, Alex C. Snoeren, George Porter, and George Papen, Proceedings of the 28th IEEE International Symposium On Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), Fayetteville, AR, May 2020.

Dark Matter: Uncovering the DarkComet RAT Ecosystem, Brown Farinholt, Mohammad Rezaeirad, Damon McCoy, and Kirill Levchenko, Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW), Taipei, Taiwan, April 2020.

RIPE IPmap Active Geolocation: Mechanism and Performance Evaluation, Ben Du, Massimo Candela, Bradley Huffaker, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc claffy, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 50(2), April 2020.

Expanding Across Time to Deliver Bandwidth Efficiency and Low Latency, William M. Mellette, Rajdeep Das, Yibo Guo, Rob McGuinness, Alex C. Snoeren, and George Porter, Proceedings of the 17th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Santa Clara, CA, February 2020.

Adapting TCP for Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks, Matthew Mukerjee, Christopher Canel, Weiyang Wang, Daehyeok Kim, Srinivasan Seshan, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the 17th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Santa Clara, CA, February 2020.

Hack for Hire, Ariana Mirian, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 62(12):32-37, December 2019.

Towards Continuous Access Control Validation and Forensics, Chengcheng Xiang, Yudong Wu, Bingyu Shen, Mingyao Shen, Haochen Huang, Tianyin Xu, Yuanyuan Zhou, Cindy Moore, Xinxin Jin, and Tianwei Sheng, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), London, UK, November 2019.

Always on Stress: The Emotive Impact of Anytime, Anywhere Discussion Boards, Megan Bardolph, George Porter, Paul Hadjipieris, and Jace Hargis, Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal 12(2), 2019.

[All Publications]

Affiliations