Nick Feamster

• Research: Network security and operations– Helping network operators run the network better– Helping users help themselves

• Lab meetings: Every Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.– Informal seminar. Papers on wireless, virtualization, etc.– Come visit us if you want to learn more

• Teaching 7001 this fall. Willing to supervise 8903s

feamster@cc.gatech.eduhttp://www.cc.gatech.edu/~feamster/Klaus 3348

Ph.D. Students

Anirudh Ramachandran Yiyi Huang (with Jim Xu)

Murtaza Motiwala

Mohammed Mukarram bin Tariq Vytautas Valancius Nadeem Syed(with Alex Gray)

The Internet “pretty much works”…right?

Food for Thought

• 911 Phone service (1993 NRIC report +)– 29 minutes per year per line– 99.994% availability

• Std. Phone service (various sources)– 53+ minutes per line per year– 99.99+% availability

• …what about the Internet?– Various studies: about 99.5%

Challenge: An Internet that is “always on”

Threats to Availability• Natural disasters

Threats to Availability• Natural disasters• Physical device failures (node, link)• Drunk network administrators (?!)

Threats to Availability• Natural disasters• Physical device failures (node, link)

– Drunk network administrators– Cisco bugs

• Security problems: spam, phishing, DoS, etc.• Misconfiguration• Mis-coordination• Changes in traffic patterns (e.g., flash crowd)• …

Three Research Areas• Network Monitoring and Security

– How to slow spam/phishing? (behavioral techniques)– How to guarantee where traffic will or won’t go?– How to counter Web censorship and surveillance?

• Network Availability and Management– How to design protocols that detect/mask failures?– How can operators detect mistakes?– How to mine large data to quickly detect problems?

• Networking and Economics– How do “selfish” users affect traffic patterns?– How to improve connectivity at the network edge?

Improving Reliability

• Step 1: Run multiple instances of the routing protocol, each with slightly perturbed versions of the configuration

• Step 2: Allow traffic to switch between instances at any node in the protocol

ts

Compute multiple forwarding trees per destination.Allow packets to switch slices midstream.

Joint with Prof. Santosh VempalaStudent: Murtaza Motiwala

• Paths become longer simply because two ASes decide not to interconnect

Comcast

Abilene

AT&T Cogent

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Peering pointsin Atlanta

Peering pointin Washington, D.C.

• Structure of Internet paths• Exploit new structure to allow new types of contracts

Improving Efficiency

Two Changes

Joint with Prof. Vijay Vaziraniand Prof. Ramesh Johari (Stanford)

My Philosophy

• Interdisciplinary: Learn and apply variety of areas– Machine learning, signal processing, algorithms, data mining– Active collaboration with Profs. Gray, Vempala, Vazirani, Xu

• Practical: Build working systems that people use– Problem driven: network management, anti-censorship, fighting

spam, etc.– Implementation and deployment of working systems

• Relevant: Close interaction with research and industry– Spam: Cisco/Ironport, Secure Computing– Network Diagnosis: AOL, Thomson, Georgia Tech Campus– Availability/Economics: NSF Future Internet Design (FIND/GENI)

Attack practical networking problems with sound, principled methods