Nick Feamster Assistant Professor Sloan Fellow Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Recipient Network Operations and Internet Security Lab School of Computer Science College of Computing Georgia Tech Klaus Advanced Computing Building Room 3348 feamster - gatech . edu Office: + 1 404 385 1944 I do not check voice mail. CV (March 2010) Publications Bio Blog

Network Operations and Internet Security Lab

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I lead the Network Operations and Internet Security Lab at Georgia Tech.

I am always looking for strong students who are interested in computer networking, particularly network operations and security.
Please apply to the graduate program if my research sounds interesting to you.
                                     

Research

My research develops tools, techniques, and protocols to improve the availability and performance of communications networks in the face of failures, misconfiguration, and malice. Simply put, I try to help network operators do their jobs better.

Please see my lab's project web page for a list of current and past projects.

Please see this research statement (Jan. 2009) for an overview of the research areas where my students and I are most active.

Research area. My research focuses on networked computer systems, with a strong emphasis on (1) network operations; (2) network architecture and protocol design; (3) high performance (i.e., high availability, high throughput) wired and wireless networks; and (4) anti-censorship techniques and systems.

Goal. The primary goal of my research is to help network operators run their networks better, and to enable users of these networks to experience high availability and good end-to-end performance. I am strongly interested in tackling practical, real-world problems using a ``first principles'' approach, designing systems based on these principles, and implementing and deploying these systems in practice.

Approach. My research runs "from practice, to theory, back to practice". I look to the real world for inspiration and practical problems. I then design solutions to these problems that have provable properties and solid theoretical backing. Finally, I build and deploy real systems based on these solutions. This first principles approach means that I bring many "tools" to bear, from algorithms to economics to machine learning. I place a strong emphasis on transfer of these results back to practice: the resulting tools and algorithms have been adopted or applied in practice.

Papers

• Network I/O Fairness for Virtual Machines
  B. Anwer, A. Nayak, N. Feamster, L. Liu
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Virtualized Infastructure Systems and Architectures
  New Delhi, India, August 2010. To appear. [.pdf]
• SwitchBlade: A Platform for Rapid Deployment of Network Protocols on Programmable Hardware
  B. Anwer, M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster
  ACM SIGCOMM,
  New Delhi, India, August 2010. To appear [.pdf]
• Outsourcing Home Network Security
  N. Feamster
  ACM SIGCOMM Home Networking Workshop,
  New Delhi, India, August 2010. To appear [.pdf]
• Instrumenting Home Networks
  K. Calvert, K. Edwards, N. Feamster, R. Grinter, Y. Deng, X. Zhou
  ACM SIGCOMM Home Networking Workshop,
  New Delhi, India, August 2010. To appear [.pdf]
• Chipping Away at Censorship with User-Generated Content
  S. Burnett, N. Feamster, S. Vempala
  USENIX Security Symposium,
  Washington, DC, August 2010. To appear [.pdf]
• Building a Dynamic Reputation System for DNS
  M. Antonakakis, R. Perdisci, D. Dagon, W. Lee, N. Feamster
  USENIX Security Symposium,
  Washington, DC, August 2010. To appear
• Wide-Area Route Control for Distributed Services
  V. Valancius, N. Feamster, J. Rexford, A. Nakao
  USENIX Annual Technical Conference,
  Boston, MA, June 2010. To appear [.pdf]
• Decoupling Policy from Configuration in Campus and Enterprise Networks
  N. Feamster, A. Nayak, H. Kim, R. Clark, Y. Mundada, A. Ramachandran, M. Tariq
  IEEE Workshop on Local and Metro Area Networks (LANMAN),
  Long Branch, NJ, May 2010. [.pdf]
• Behavioral Clustering of HTTP-based Malware and Signature Generation using Malicious Network Traces
  R. Perdisci, W. Lee, N. Feamster
  USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI),
  San Jose, CA, April 2010. [.pdf]
• Detecting Network Neutrality Violations with Causal Inference
  M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
  ACM SIGCOMM CoNext,
  Rome, Italy, December 2009. [.pdf]

Teaching