UCSD CSE - Systems and Networking

Zhaomo Yang (Ph.D. 2019) → Google
Louis DeKoven (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
Brown Farinholt (Ph.D. 2019) → Facebook
William (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)
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

[All Alumni]

Recent News

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.

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.

August 18— Today, at Crypto 2019, Nadia Heninger was named the recipient of the CRA-W's Borg Early Career Award! Congrats Nadia!

August 14— Kudos to Nishant Bhaskar, Maxwell Bland, Kirill Levchenko, and Aaron Schulman for their work on detecting card skimmers in retail gas pumps. Their app, Bluetana, is now in use by multiple law enforcement and regulatory agencies across four states and has been used to discovery dozens of card skimmers. You can read more in the press: Krebs on Security, KBPS, Gizmodo, Techcrunch or in the original paper at USENIX Security.

August 14— Congrats to Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their Berkeley colleagues (notably Ph.D. student Grant Ho who, was the sole student on this effort) for winning the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security for their paper, Detecting and Characterizing Lateral Phishing at Scale.

June 14— Alex Gamero-Garrido has been awarded a Microsoft Dissertation Grant to support his work identifying nations whose Internet connectivity is particularly vulnerable to censorship, inspection, or disruption by foreign countries. Congratulations Alex!

June 7— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian for receiving the 2019 CSE Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service/Leadership, together with Ailie Fraser. Thank you for your dedication, Ariana!

May 30— Congrats to Hadi Givehchian. He and Yeswanth Guddeti won a $100k Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their work with Aaron Schulman and Dinesh Bharadia on the Sweepsense wideband sensing system.

May 24— Congratulations to Louis Dekoven and Brown Farinholt for defending their respective dissertations today. This double header started with Brown's "Understanding the Remote Access Trojan malware ecosystem through the lens of the infamous DarkComet RAT", broke for lunch, and then concluded with Louis, "Addressing Device Compromise from the Perspective of Large Organizations". This is not their last party together however, as both are eventually headed to a new group at Facebook's DC office.

[All News]

Recent Publications

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.

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(2), 2019.

[All Publications]

Affiliations