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The systems and networking group at UCSD engages in a wide range of experimental and theoretical research. Our current projects span fault-tolerant networks and systems, high-speed router design, storage system design, network measurement and traffic analysis, peer-to-peer system design, network security, mobile code architectures, high-performance cluster computing, and wireless networking. Our group consists of eight core faculty, a range of affiliated faculty (in a broad range of areas including security, machine learning and programming languages) and over 50 graduate students and research staff.

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Faculty
Amy Ousterhout
George Porter
Stefan Savage
Aaron Schulman
Alex C. Snoeren
Geoffrey M. Voelker
Yiying Zhang
Yuanyuan Zhou
Affiliated Faculty
Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Dinesh Bharadia (ECE)
kc claffy (CAIDA)
Christian Dameff
Earlence Fernandes
Alex Gantman
Nadia Heninger
Ranjit Jhala
Sorin Lerner
Pat Pannuto
George Papen (ECE)
Hovav Shacham
Deian Stefan
Steve Swanson
Research and Administrative Staff
Cindy Moore
Jennifer Folkestad
PhD Students
Reyna Abhyankar
Liam Arzola
Rukshani Athapathu
Alex Bellon
Anirudh Canumalla
Paul Chung
Linsong Guo
Zijian He
Miro Haller
Michelina Hanlon
Yutong Huang
Katherine Izhikevich
Ryan Kosta
Seoyoung Kweon
Elisa Luo
Tyler Potyondy
Sumanth Rao
Tianyi Shan
Laura Shea
Ye Shu
Vikranth Srivatsa
Alisha Ukani
Yibo Wei
Wenyi "Morty" Zhang
MS Students
Zimu Guan
 
BS Students
Anika Agarwal
AnMei Dasbach-Prisk
 
Recent Alumni
Eric Mugnier (Ph.D. 2026) Meta

Ben Du (Ph.D. 2025) UCLA postdoc
Enze Alex Liu (Ph.D. 2025) → CMU postdoc
Amanda Tomlinson (Ph.D. 2025)Google
Keegan Ryan (Ph.D. 2025)Trail of Bits
George Sullivan (Ph.D. 2025)
Evan Johnson (Ph.D. 2025) NYU
Zesen Zhang (Ph.D. 2025) Amazon
Zhiyuan Guo (Ph.D. 2025) Cornell (postdoc)

Hadi Givehchian (Ph.D. 2024) AppleAnthropic
Rajdeep Das (Ph.D. 2024) Microsoft
Stewart Grant (Ph.D. 2024) Roblox
Yibo Guo (Ph.D. 2024) Google
Anil Yelam (Ph.D. 2024) Google
Li Zhong (Ph.D. 2024) Apple

Samir Rashid (M.S. 2025) Starlink
Anthony Tarbinian (M.S. 2025) Apple
Saarth Deshpande (M.S. 2024) UT Austin Ph.D. program

Ruinan Ma (B.S. 2025) Meta
Yunxiang Chi (B.S. 2024) Princeton Ph.D. program

Alex Forencich (postdoc 2020-2024) UCSD (proj scientist)

Joseph Pasquale (Emeritus faculty, 2025)

[All Alumni]
Recent News

Eric Mugnier March 13— Congratulations to Eric Mugnier who successfully defended his thesis, "Democratizing Practical Formal Verification for Real Systems Through a User-Centered Approach", on Friday the 13th! Dr. Mugnier will soon be leaving us to join many of our other alumns at Meta. Congrats Eric!

December 2— Good things come in pairs. Congratulations to Alex Yen who successfully defended his thesis today, "Non-Traditional Infrastructure for Wide-Area Wireless Connectivity". Alex wins the award for the most diverse assortment of communication platforms, including planes, trains, and balloons. Congrats Alex! Alex Yen

George Sullivan November 13— Congratulations to George Sullivan who successfully defended his thesis today, "Passive Aggressive: Network Attacks via Passive Analysis". Today therefore also marks George's tearful/joyful goodbye to the hygiene server. Congrats George!

Satellite Team October 13— Congrats to Wenyi "Morty" Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman for their amazing CCS paper featured in today's Wired Story "Satellites are Leaking the World's Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data"! More information can be found at the project page. Satellite Team Award

August 13— CSE alumni Stephen Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Danny Anderson, along with Brian Kantor, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage at UCSD together with Yoshi Kohno, Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis and Franziska Roesner at UW received the 2025 USENIX Security Test of Time award today for their 2011 paper Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces. This paper, along with its predecessor (which also received the Test-of-time award at IEEE in 2020), is credited with helping to establish the field of modern automotive security. This body of work also received the AAAS Golden Goose Award in 2021. Congratulations to everyone on such an outstanding accomplishment! USENIX Security Test of Time Award

Enze August 11— Congratulations to Enze "Alex" Liu who defended his dissertation today, entitled "Security Vulnerabilities in Service Composition"! Alex has been a cornerstone of the sysnetsec groups, promoting community within the department, supporting and guiding many other students, and blazing trails with his research. Dr. Liu soon transitions to CMU as a postdoc. Congrats, Alex!

August 1— Today Amanda Tomlinson successfully defended her dissertation, "Leveraging the Variability of Computing Resources and Renewable Energy to Lower the Carbon Footprint of Computing", to a very energetic crowd. Dr. Tomlinson will soon be leaving us to join Google where she will continue to innocently invite colleagues to play a quick game of pool. Congratulations Amanda! Amanda Tomlinson

Amy Ousterhout July 16— Congrats to Amy Ousterhout for receiving an inaugural "Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award" in recognition of the significance and promise of her work in Operating Systems and Networks. More on the new award, given to leading faculty at 27 US universities, in a Google blog post from sysnet alumn Amin Vahdat.

June 12— Congratulations to Zhiyuan Guo who defended his dissertation today, entitled "Building End-to-end Disaggregation Stack via Cross Layer Co-Design"! Zhiyuan will be taking his many talents to Cornell as a postdoc. Congrats, Zhiyuan! Zhiyuan Guo

Evan Johnson at Oakland June 04— Congrats to Evan Johnson for defending his dissertation, "Verifiably Secure Software Sandboxing"! Evan came to us from Illinois, refined his inner chill over six years here in SoCal, and is now off to try the other coast as an Asst Professor at NYU. Congrats and good luck Evan!
[All News]
Recent Publications

Understanding Server-side Commercial Fingerprinting, Elisa Luo, Tom Ritter, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Dubai, UAE, April 2026.

Canvassing the Fingerprinters: Characterizing Canvas Fingerprinting Use Across the Web, Elisa Luo, Tom Ritter, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madison, Wisconsin, October 2025.

Somesite I Used To Crawl: Awareness, Agency and Efficacy in Protecting Content Creators From AI Crawlers, Enze Liu, Elisa Luo, Shawn Shan, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Ben Y. Zhao, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madison, Wisconsin, October 2025.

Tock: From Research to Securing 10 Million Computers, Leon Schuermann, Bradford Campbell, Branden Ghena, Philip Levis, Amit Levy, and Pat Pannuto, Proceedings of the 31st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Seoul, Republic of Korea, October 2025.

TickTock: Verified Isolation in a Production Embedded OS, Vivien Rindisbacher, Evan Johnson, Nico Lehmann, Tyler Potyondy, Pat Pannuto, Stefan Savage, Deian Stefan, and Ranjit Jhala, Proceedings of the 31st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Seoul, Republic of Korea, October 2025.

Pesto: Cooking up High Performance BFT Queries, Florian Suri-Payer, Neil Giridharan, Liam Arzola, Shir Cohen, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Natacha Crooks, Proceedings of the 31st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Seoul, Republic of Korea, October 2025.

Don’t Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites, Wenyi Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2025.

Local Frames: Exploiting Inherited Origins to Bypass Content Blockers, Alisha Ukani, Hamed Haddadi, Alex C. Snoeren, and Peter Snyder, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2025.

Abusability of Automation Apps in Intimate Partner Violence, Shirley Zhang, Paul Chung, Jacob VerVelde, Nishant Korapati, Rahul Chatterjee, and Kassem Fawaz, Proceedings of the 34th USENIX Security Symposium, Seattle, WA, USA, August 2025.

Cognify: Supercharging Gen-AI Workflows With Hierarchical Autotuning, Zijian He, Reyna Abhyankar, Vikranth Srivatsa, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 2025.

Building Bridges: Safe Interactions with Foreign Languages through Omniglot, Leon Schuermann, Jack Troubes, Tyler Potyondy, Pat Pannuto, Mae Milano, and Amit Levy, Proceedings of the 19th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Boston, MA, USA, July 2025. (Jay Lepreau Best Paper).

OSWorld-Human: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Computer-Use Agents, Reyna Abhyankar, Qi Qi, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computer-Use Agents (WCUA), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, July 2025.

Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage, Jeffrey L. Tully, Sumanth Rao, Isabel Straw, Rodney A. Gabriel, Chris Longhurst, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Christian J. Dameff, JAMA Network Open 8(7):e2530226-e2530226, July 2025.

Cuckoo for Clients: Disaggregated Cuckoo Hashing, Stewart Grant and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, July 2025.

PageFlex: Flexible and Efficient User-space Delegation of Linux Paging Policies with eBPF, Anil Yelam, Kan Wu, Zhiyuan Guo, Rajath Shashidhara, Stanko Novakovic, Suli Yang, Wei Xu, Alex C. Snoeren, and Kimberly Keeton, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, July 2025.

From Scarcity to Opportunity: Examining Abuse of the IPv4 Leasing Market, Bernhard Degen, Ben Du, Ricky K. P. Mok, Raffaele Sommese, Mattijs Jonker, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, and kc claffy, Proceedings of the 6th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), June 2025.

Understanding the Efficacy of Phishing Training in Practice, Grant Ho, Ariana Mirian, Elisa Luo, Khang Tong, Euyhyun Lee, Lin Liu, Christopher A. Longhurst, Christian Dameff, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2025.

SC-Bench: A Large-Scale Dataset for Smart Contract Auditing, Shihao Xia, Mengting He, Linhai Song, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Large Language Models for Code, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, May 2025.

A Developer-Friendly Application-Integrated Far Memory, Anil Yelam, Stewart Grant, Nadav Amit, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Amy Ousterhout, Marcos K. Aguilera, and Alex C. Snoeren, USENIX ;login:, 2025.

[All Publications]
Affiliations
Center for Networked Systems (CNS)         Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)       Center for Wireless Communications (CWC)CWC        San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC)        California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-IT2) CalIT(2)
Sponsors