Research Projects

  • Security for Software Defined Networks
    Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm whose defining characteristic is a centralization of network control and a separation of the data and control planes. While this approach has numerous benefits, including improved flexibility and network management, it also creates a single point of failure and a high value target for attackers. As a result, I am interested in developing methods and tools to automatically identify bugs, vulnerabilites, and attacks in these systems prior to their release.

  • Security with Software Defined Networks
    Software Defined Networking also provides a number of unique features, including a single global view of the network, a separated control plane, and the ability to control the entire network easily, that should make possible new improvements in network security. I'm interested in exploring these new security possibilites.

  • Automated Discovery of Congestion Control Attacks
    Congestion Control is crucial to the correct functioning of the Internet and many of the transport protocols that we use daily. Unfortunately, this is a long history of attacks enabling attackers to cheat congestion control. I'm interested in exploring how to identify such attacks in a systematic and automated manner such that they can be discovered prior to the release of vulnerable software.

  • Automated Vulnerability Discovery
    Distributed systems and networking protocols form the key to many extremely important systems required to be highly available. However, such systems rarely receive more than ad hoc testing, typically in the form of a developer test suite. This results in software systems with a large number of vulnerabilities, as we see today. I have examined how to provide automatic testing without modifying the application or requiring source code.

  • The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) [INACTIVE]
    DCCP is a networking protocol that provides congestion control without guaranteeing reliability. This makes it particularly valuable for VoIP, IPTV, and Internet-connected gaming. My research has focused on examining the performance of DCCP in testbed and Internet environments with particular interest on fairness and applicability for real-time, streaming media applications.

  • Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN)[INACTIVE]
    DTN has many potential uses, including disruption resistant networks for the military, sensor networks, third world Internet, and space communication. My work has concentrated heavily on this last use case.