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
October 2009.
- Our paper on detecting network neutrality violations will appear in
CoNext 2009.
- Our paper on a fast, programmable data plane for virtual networks,
implemented on the NetFPGA platform, was the top-ranked paper at the
SIGCOMM VISA workshop, and has been fast-tracked to ACM
Computer Communications Review.
- I co-organized the inaugural CoC Research Day.
August 2009.
- Our work on network-level spam filtering, SNARE,
will appear in the USENIX Security Symposium in Montreal.
This
work is featured on Slashdot and MetaFilter, as
well as in Technology
Review
- Our work on making network tomography practical and on VLAN
dependency analysis will both appear at
ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference in October.
- Our work on detecting network neutrality violations will appear at
ACM SIGCOMM CoNext in December.
- We have three demos in the ACM SIGCOMM demo session
this year, and two papers in the workshops.
June 2009. I helped organize a panel and assemble a document for
providing a "data wish list" for security research for the Office of
Science and Technology Policy. That document is available here.
April 2009. Our study of online scam hosting
infrastructures received the
award paper at Passive and Active Measurement 2009. [Data]
March 2009. NANO
Released!
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
Here are some
recent papers (complete list):
- Detecting Network Neutrality Violations with Causal
Inference
M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
ACM SIGCOMM CoNext,
Rome, Italy, December 2009. To appear
- Measurement Methods for Fast and Accurate Blackhole
Identification with Binary Tomography
I. Cunha, R. Teixeira, N. Feamster, C. Diot
ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
Chicago, Illinois, November 2009. To appear.
- Characterizing VLAN-Induced Sharing in a Campus
Network
A. Mansy, M. Tariq, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
Chicago, Illinois, November 2009. To appear.
- 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.
[.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.
[.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.
[.pdf]
Top-Ranked Paper, fast-tracked to ACM SIGCOMM Computer
Communications Review
- 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
I'm fortunate to work with some very hard-working and inspiring
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
Spring 2009 - - CS 6262:
Network Security
Fall 2008
- CS 4251:
Computer Networking II [Previous terms: Spring 2008]
Fall 2008 - CS 7001: Introduction to Graduate Studies [Previous
terms: Fall
2007, Fall 2006]
Spring 2007 - CS 7260:
Internet Architectures and Protocols [Previous terms: Spring 2006]
Fall 2006 - CS 8001: Networking Research
Seminar
Funding
I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation,
the Sloan Foundation, Cisco, IBM, Department of Homeland Security,
DARPA, and Yahoo.