UCSD CSE - Systems and Networking

Lixiang Ao (Ph.D. 2022) → Databricks
Gautam Akiwate (Ph.D. 2022) → Stanford postdoc
Sam Crow (Ph.D. 2022)
Yizhou Shan (Ph.D. 2022) → Huawei Cloud
Bingyu Shen (Ph.D. 2022) → Meta
Alex Gamero-Garrido (Ph.D. 2021) → NEU Postdoc
Rob McGuinness (Ph.D. 2021) → UCSD ECE Postdoc
Chengcheng Xiang (Ph.D. 2021) → Meta
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

August 23— The Internet Measurement Conference results came out today and once again, UC San Diego was well-represented --- with authors on 7 of the 56 papers papers (and alumns on another 3). Congrats to Ben Du, Audrey Randall, Alisha Ukani, kc Claffy, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Alex Snoeren and Geoff Voelker on their hard work and good luck, and a special congratulations to Gautam Akiwate who hit the IMC jackpot with five of his papers accepted!

July 8— Congrats to Sam Crow who successfully defended his thesis today, "Security Testing Tools for Complex Cyber-Physical Systems". No doubt the only Ph.D. we've seen that involved significant chunks of a 737 in their home. Congrats!

June 1— Congrats to Gautam Akiwate who successfully defended his thesis today, "Identifying DNS Infrastructure Hijacks using Large Scale Measurements". Gautam will be starting a Postdoc with Zakir Durumeric at Stanford. Gautam has been a force for good in the department for longer than he will admit -- supporting Chez Bob, the holiday parties, sysnet outings, etc -- and we will all miss him.

May 23— Eleven years ago, UCSD alumns Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, He Liu, and Damon McCoy, along with UCSD faculty Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their colleagues from Berkeley and Budapest, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, published a comprehensive analysis of the spam criminal value chain. Today that paper, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain and its impact was celebrated with the Test-of-Time award, presented at the 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy conference. Congrats all!

April 13— Fourteen years after publishing their 2008 ASPLOS paper "Learning from Mistakes -- A Comprehensive Study on Real World Concurrency Bug Characteristics", YY Zhou and her co-authors have received this year's "Most Influential Paper" award from ASPLOS for this work. Congrats to YY, Shan, Soyeon and Eunsoo!

April 4— The results of this year's NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program are out and we are delighted to share that Alisha Ukani was among the winners. Congrats Alisha!

March 4— Back-to-back defenders! Congratulations also to Yizhou Shan, who defended his dissertation today on "Distributing and Disaggregating Resources in Data Centers". Yizhou will be starting as Research Scientist at Huawei Cloud this spring.

March 3— Congratulations to Lixiang Ao, who defended his dissertation today on "Framework and Platform Support for General Purpose Serverless Computing". Lixiang will be starting at Databricks this spring.

February 2— Congratulations to Stewart Grant who is one of the 2022 Meta PhD Research Fellowship winners. Stew is one of only two students selected in networking among the 37 fellows. Congrats, Stew!

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 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 8— We just learned that our own Alisha Ukani has been named to this year's class of UCSD ACRS Foundation Fellows. Congrats Alisha!

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.

[All News]

Recent Publications

Access Denied: Assessing Physical Risks to Internet Access Networks, Alexander Marder, Zesen Zhang, Ricky Mok, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Bradley Huffaker, Matthew Luckie, Alberto Dainotti, kc claffy, Alex C. Snoeren, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, August 2023.

Improving Logging to Reduce Permission Over-Granting Mistakes, Bingyu Shen, Tianyi Shan, and Yuanyuan Zhou, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, August 2023.

No Privacy Among Spies: Assessing the Functionality and Insecrutiy of Consumer Android Spyware Apps, Enze Liu, Sumanth Rao, Sam Havron, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Damon McCoy, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2023.

Scaling beyond packet switch limits with multiple dataplanes, Yibo Guo, William M. Mellette, Alex C. Snoeren, and George Porter, Proceedings of ACM CoNEXT, Rome, Italy, December 2022.

Retroactive Identification of Targeted DNS Infrastructure Hijacking, Gautam Akiwate, Raffaele Sommese, Mattijs Jonker, Zakir Durumeric, kc Claffy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

Where .ru? Assessing the Impact of Conflict on Russian Domain Infrastructure, Mattijs Jonker, Gautam Akiwate, Antonia Affinito, kc Claffy, Alessio Botta, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Rolan van Rijswijk-Deij, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

Measuring UID Smuggling in the Wild, Audrey Randall, Peter Snyder, Alisha Ukani, Alex C. Snoeren, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

Stop, DROP, and ROA: Effectiveness of Defenses through the lens of DROP, Leo Oliver, Gautam Akiwate, Matthew Luckie, Ben Du, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

ZDNS: A Fast DNS Toolkit for Internet Measurement, Liz Izhikevich, Gautam Akiwate, Briana Berger, Spencer Drakontaidis, Anna Ascheman, Paul Pearce, David Adrian, and Zakir Durumeric, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

Mind Your MANRS: Measuring the MANRS Ecosystem, Ben Du, Cecilia Testart, Romain Fontugne, Gautam Akiwate, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Nice, France, October 2022.

Measuring Security Practices, Louis F. DeKoven, Audrey Randall, Ariana Mirian, Gautam Akiwate, Ansel Blume, Lawrence K. Saul, Aaron Schulman, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 65(9):93-102, September 2022.

Time-division TCP for Reconfigurable Data Center Networks, Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Weiyang Wang, Christopher Canel, Srinivasan Seshan, Alex C. Snoeren, and Peter Steenkiste, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 2022. (The first two authors contributed equally).

Domain Name Lifetimes: Baseline and Threats, Antonia Affinito, Raffaele Sommese, Gautam Akiwate, Stefan Savage, KC Claffy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Alessio Botta, and Mattijs Jonker, Proceedings of Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), June 2022.

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.

FaaS Made Fast Using Snapshot-based VMs, Lixiang Ao, George Porter, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the 17th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'22), Rennes, France, April 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).

[All Publications]

Affiliations