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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.

People  |   News  |   Publications  |   Sponsors   |   Internal
Faculty
Amy Ousterhout
Joseph Pasquale
George Porter
Stefan Savage
Aaron Schulman
Alex C. Snoeren
Geoffrey M. Voelker
Yiying Zhang
Yuanyuan Zhou
Affiliated Faculty
Dinesh Bharadia (ECE)
kc claffy (CAIDA)
Christian Dameff
Nadia Heninger
Ranjit Jhala
Sorin Lerner
Pat Pannuto
George Papen (ECE)
Lawrence Saul
Deian Stefan
Steve Swanson
Research and Administrative Staff
Alex Forencich
Cindy Moore
Jennifer Folkestad
PhD Students
Reyna Abhyankar
Rukshani Athapathu
Alex Bellon
Anirudh Canumalla
Junda Chen
Rajdeep Das
Ben Du
Hadi Givehchian
Linsong Guo
Yibo Guo
Zhiyuan Guo
Stewart Grant
Zijian He
Miro Haller
Yutong Huang
Evan Johnson
William Lin
Enze Alex Liu
Elisa Luo
Eric Mugnier
Sumanth Rao
Keegan Ryan
Tianyi Shan
Laura Shea
Vikranth Srivatsa
George Sullivan
Amanda Tomlinson
Alisha Ukani
Yibo Wei
Anil Yelam
Zesen Zhang
Li Zhong
MS Students
Katherine Izhikevich
Tyler Potyondy
BS Students
Ryan Kosta    
Recent Alumni
Nishant Bhaskar (Ph.D. 2023) MQ Prime
Grant Ho (postdoc 2021-2023) University of Chicago
Alex Marder (postdoc 2019-2020, Res. Scientist 2020-2023)Johns Hopkins University
Ariana Mirian (Ph.D. 2023) Censys
Audrey Randall (Ph.D. 2023) Google
Lixiang Ao (Ph.D. 2022) Databricks
Gautam Akiwate (Ph.D. 2022) Stanford postdoc
Sam Crow (Ph.D. 2022) Meta
Haochen Huang (Ph.D. 2022) Whova
Yizhou Shan (Ph.D. 2022) Huawei Cloud
Bingyu Shen (Ph.D. 2022) Meta
Alex Gamero-Garrido (Ph.D. 2021) NEU PostdocUC Davis
Rob McGuinness (Ph.D. 2021) UCSD ECE Postdoc
Chengcheng Xiang (Ph.D. 2021) Meta

Zachary Blanco (M.S. 2023) IBM
Yudong Wu (M.S. 2023)
Stephan Chenette (M.S. 2021) Co-Founder and CTO AttackIQ
Xuhao Luo (M.S. 2021) UIUC Ph.D. program

Isabel Suizo (B.S. 2022) GoogleCMU Ph.D. program
Jie Jeff Xu (B.S. 2022) Georgia Tech Ph.D. program
Godwin Pang (B.S. 2021) Confluent
Priyal Suneja (B.S. 2021) UW Ph.D. program

[All Alumni]
Recent News

Christian Dameff and Jeff Tulley October 2— The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced a $9.5 million dollar award to UC San Diego to develop new ways to mitigate ransomware attacks on hospitals. This effort, led by Christian Dameff and Jeff Tulley, is joint between UCSD Health and the UCSD School of Engineering (notably our own Aaron Schulman, Geoff Voelker, and Stefan Savage) and is just the latest to come out of a long standing collaboration in this space. Congrats everyone!

September 11— Congrats to Rajdeep Das and Alex Snoeren for their paper Memory Management in ActiveRMT: Towards Runtime-programmable Switches, which received the Best Paper award at ACM SIGCOMM! Rajdeep Das

Aaron Schulman August 29— Congrats to our own Aaron Schulman for his recent NSF CAREER grant and for his promotion to tenured associate professor. Congrats!

July 24— Congratulations to Nishant Bhaskar for defending his dissertation, "An Empirical Approach to Securing Wireless Access Links in Urban Areas". Nishant's unique research had him driving across Souther California and brought him in touch with both industry and government (special thanks to the folks from USSS who attended the defense). He'll next be doing crazy wireless things at MQ Prime. Congrats Nishant! Nishant Bhaskar

Euro Security and Privacy award for July 4— Congratulations to Enze "Alex" Liu (and co-authors) for winning the Best Paper award at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) for their work on insecurities in e-mail forwarding frameworks and implimentations. UCSD put out a nice summary of the work here.

June 9— Sysnet represents! Congrats to Ben Du and Audrey Randall for dominating the doctoral component of the CSE department'ss Award Ceremony tonight. Audrey received the department's "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Research" and Ben the "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Teaching" and the "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service and Leadership". Congrats, you both make us proud! Audrey Randall And Ben Du

Grant Ho May 26— Congratulations to Grant Ho for his appointment as Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Grant was part of the inaugural class of the CSE Fellows postdoctoral program and was a joy to work with these last few years. Congrats and best of luck!

Evan Johnson at Oakland May 22— Congrats to Evan Johnson (and co-authors) for winning the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award for WaVe: a verificable secure WebAssembly sandboxing runtime further shrinking the trusted computing base for Wasm! Evan Johnson at Oakland2

May 18— Congratulations to Audrey Randall who defended her dissertation today, "Names to Conjure With: Measuring and Combating Online Adversaries by Studying Their Use of Naming System". As one of many firsts during her time with us, Audrey premiered as post-defense music video reflecting on her time at UCSD. Audrey will bring her talents to Google and we wish her the best. Congrats! Audrey Randall

Ariana Mirian April 21— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian who gave a spirited defense of her dissertation, "Prioritizing Security Practices via Large-Scale Measurement of User Behavior". This was quite an event, filling room 1242 and with well-wishers from four different universities and a gaggle of companies online for the festivities. Ariana will be joining Censys in the Fall and we are looking forward to seeing what she does next. Congrats!

April 11— Congratulations to Katherine Izhikevich for receiving the 2023 Stephen L. Squires SWSIS Scholarship for Women Studying Information Security administered by Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA) and the CRA. Katherine Izhikevich
[All News]
Recent Publications

Using Honeybuckets to Characterize Cloud Storage Scanning in the Wild, Katherine Izhikevich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Liz Izhikevich, Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Vienna, Austria, July 2024.

Unfiltered: Measuring Cloud-based Email Filtering Bypasses, Sumanth Rao, Enze Liu, Grant Ho, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024.

The Double Edged Sword: Identifying Authentication Pages and their Fingerprinting Behavior, Asuman Senol, Alisha Ukani, Dylan Cutler, and Igor Bilogrevic, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024.

Practical Obfuscation of BLE Physical-Layer Fingerprints on Mobile Devices, Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Alexender Redding, Han Zhao, Aaron Schulman, and Dinesh Bharadia, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2024.

Network Topology Facilitates Internet Traffic Control in Autocracies, Eda Keremoğlu, Nils B. Weidmann, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Esteban Carisimo, Alberto Dainotti, and Alex C. Snoeren, PNAS Nexus 3(3), March 2024.

An Empirical Analysis of Enterprise-Wide Mandatory Password Updates, Ariana Mirian, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Austin, TX, December 2023.

IRRegularities in the Internet Routing Registry, Ben Du, Katherine Izhikevich, Sumanth Rao, Cecilia Testart, Gautam Akiwate, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Montreal, Canada, October 2023.

Cornflakes: Zero-Copy Serialization for Microsecond-Scale Networking, Deepti Raghavan, Shreya Ravi, Gina Yuan, Pratiksha Thaker, Sanjari Srivastava, Micah Murray, Pedro Henrique Penna, Amy Ousterhout, Philip Levis, Matei Zaharia, and Irene Zhang, Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Koblenz, Germany, October 2023.

Mira: A Program-Behavior-Guided Far Memory System, Zhiyuan Guo, Zijian He, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Koblenz, Germany, October 2023.

A Cloud-Scale Characterization of Remote Procedure Calls, Korakit Seemakhupt, Brent E. Stephens, Samira Khan, Sihang Liu, Hassan Wassel, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Alex C. Snoeren, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Culler, and Hank M. Levy, Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Koblenz, Germany, October 2023.

Limited Access: The Truth Behind Far Memory, Anil Yelam, Stewart Grant, Enze Liu, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Marcos K. Aguilera, Amy Ousterhout, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the Workshop on Resource Disaggregation and Serverless Computing (WORDS), October 2023.

Crescendo: Towards Real-time, Wide-band, High-fidelity Spectrum Sensing Systems, Raghav Subbaraman, Kevin Mills, Aaron Schulman, and Dinesh Bharadia, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Madrid, Spain, October 2023.

Memory Management in ActiveRMT: Towards Runtime-programmable Switches, Rajdeep Das and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, New York, NY, September 2023. (Best paper award).

Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and Shutdowns, Zachary S. Bischof, Kennedy Pitcher, Esteban Carisimo, Amanda Meng, Rafael Bezerra Nunes, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Margaret E. Roberts, Alex C. Snoeren, and Alberto Dainotti, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, New York, NY, September 2023.

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 31st 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 31st USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, August 2023.

MultiView: Finding Blind Spots in Access-Deny Issues, Bingyu Shen, Tianyi Shan, and Yuanyuan Zhou, Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, August 2023.

Understanding the Viability of Gmail's Origin Indicator for Identifying the Sender, Enze Liu, Lu Sun, Alex Bellon, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Imani N. S. Munyaka, Proceedings of the Symposium on Useable Privacy and Security, Anaheim, CA, August 2023.

In the Line of Fire: Risks of DPI-triggered Data Collection, Ariana Mirian, Alisha Ukani, Ian Foster, Gautam Akiwate, Taner Halicioglu, Cindy Moore, Alex C. Snoeren, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET), Marina del Rey, CA, August 2023.

No Privacy Among Spies: Assessing the Functionality and Insecurity of Consumer Android Spyware Apps, Enze Liu, Sumanth Rao, Sam Havron, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Damon McCoy, Proceedings of the 23rd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2023.

Forward Pass: On the Security Implications of Email Forwarding Mechanism and Policy, Enze Liu, Gautam Akiwate, Mattijs Jonker, Ariana Mirian, Grant Ho, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Delft, The Netherlands, July 2023, pages 373-391. (Best paper award).

Out of Hand for Hardware? Within Reach for Software!, Zhihong Luo, Silvery Fu, Emmanuel Amaro, Amy Ousterhout, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker, Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-XIX), Providence, RI, June 2023.

Make It Real: An End-to-End Implementation of A Physically Disaggregated Data Center, Yiying Zhang, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 57(1):1-9, 2023.

Ransomware Attack Associated With Disruptions at Adjacent Emergency Departments in the US, Christian Dameff, Jeffrey Tully, Theodore C. Chan, Edward M. Castillo, Stefan Savage, Patricia Maysent, Thomas M. Hemmen, Brian J. Clay, and Christopher A. Longhurst, JAMA Network Open 6(5):e2312270-e2312270, 2023.

TagAlong: Free, Wide-Area Data-Muling and Services, Alex Bellon, Alex Yen, and Pat Pannuto, Proceedings of International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), Newport Beach, CA, 2023.

[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