Nick Feamster Assistant Professor Sloan Fellow Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Recipient Networking Group 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. Bookmarks Twitter CV (January 2009) Publications Bio

I am looking for strong students who are interested in computer networking, particularly network operations.

                                      Please apply to the graduate program if my research sounds interesting to you.
                                      Outside of the lab, Atlanta is a great place for running, cycling, dining, music etc.

News

NANO Released! (March 2009)

Availability
Our paper on path splicing appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008. A deployment is in progress.

Spam, Phishing, and Fast Flux
Fast flux: Our study of online scam hosting infrastructures received the award paper at Passive and Active Measurement 2009. [Data]
Sender reputation: Our work on behavioral blacklisting for spam filtering appeared at ACM CCS 2007.
Network-level behavior: Our paper on spam received the best student paper award at SIGCOMM 2006.

Transparency and Troubleshooting
Network neutrality: Our work on detecting network neutrality violations appeared at HotNets 2008 in October. NANO is available for download.
Configuration: Our work on evaluating "What-If" scenarios in network configurations appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008.
Dynamics: Our work on network-wide disruption detection appeared at SIGMETRICS 2007.

Accountability
Our work on improving Internet accountability appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008.
Our work on fast monitoring of traffic subpopulations, which appeared at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2008, is being deployed in military networks.

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 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

• Detecting Spammers with SNARE: Spatio-Temporal Network-Level Automated Reputation Engine
  S. Hao, N. Feamster, A. Gray, N. Syed, S. Krasser
  18th USENIX Security Symposium,
  Montreal, Canada, August 2009. To appear. [.pdf]
  
• Resonance: Inference-based Dynamic Access Control for Enterprise Networks
  A. Nayak, A. Reimers, N. Feamster, R. Clark
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Research on Enterprise Networks,
  Barcelona, Spain, August 2009. To appear. [.pdf]
  
• Building a Fast, Virtualized Data Plane with Programmable Hardware
  B. Anwer, N. Feamster
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Virtualized Infastructure Systems and Architectures
  Barcelona, Spain, August 2009. To appear. [.pdf]
  
• Dynamics of Online Scam Hosting Infrastructure
  M. Konte, N. Feamster, J. Jung
  Proc. Passive and Actice Measurement Conference (PAM),
  Seoul, Korea, April 2009. [.pdf]
  Award Paper (Data)
• NANO: Network Access Neutrality Observatory
  M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM HotNets VII,
  Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 2008. [.pdf]
• Fast Monitoring of Traffic Subpopulations
  A. Ramachandran, S. Seetharaman, N. Feamster, V. Vazirani
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
  Vouliagmeni, Greece, October 2008. [.pdf]
• Path Splicing
  M. Motiwala, M. Elmore, N. Feamster, S. Vempala
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]
• Answering What-If Deployment and Configuration Questions with WISE
  M. Tariq, A. Zeitoun, V. Valancius, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]
• Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP)
  D. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, N. Feamster, T. Koponen, D. Moon, S. Shenker
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]

Students

Ph.D. Students
Sam Burnett
Shuang Hao - spam filtering, inference
Yiyi Huang (with Jim Xu) - Network Monitoring
Maria Konte - Fast-flux Detection
Murtaza Motiwala - VINI, Path Splicing, Data Center Operations
Robert Lychev (with Sasha Boldyreva)
Muhammad Mukarram Bin Tariq (with Mostafa Ammar) - Network Operations
Anirudh Ramachandran - Spam filtering, network monitoring, social networks
Vytautas Valancius - Internet economics

Masters Students
Bilal Anwer
Yogesh Mundada

Alums
Kaushik Bhandankar - Now at Google
Chris Kelly - Now at SugarCRM

Teaching

Funding