I am a Computer Science graduate student in the PhD program at UC Berkeley. My advisor is Sylvia Ratnasamy, and my research interests are primarily in computer networks. I received my Master's from Berkeley in December 2012; my thesis focused on new deployment models for middleboxes.

Research

I'm interested in big networking questions surrounding middleboxes, Internet-scale systems, measurement, Internet architecture, and cloud computing. Some of my past and current projects are below; a full list of my work is on my CV.

Making Middleboxes Someone Else's Problem

In a study of 57 enterprise networks, we found that middleboxes like firewalls and caches are expensive, failure-prone, and difficult to manage. To resolve these challenges, we built APLOMB, a service which allows enterprises to ditch their middleboxes entirely. With APLOMB, cloud providers offer middleboxes as a "service" to enterprise clients who tunnel their traffic to a nearby datacenter to receive security and performance processing services.

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Netcalls

Services like firewalling, protocol acceleration, and caching are widely available today through the deployment of middleboxes. However, these capabilities are not exposed to end host applications through the `interface' the network exposes to them. We designed netcalls to allow end hosts to invoke and configure the advanced capabilities offered in any network their traffic traverses; for example, we built a web server which invokes inter-domain DDoS defense when it detects it is under attack.

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Internet Measurements with IP Timestamps

IP timestamps are a little-known feature of every packet that traverses the Internet, allowing a client to request a simple timestamp from any router which handles the packet. We showed that IP timestamps are supported by a substantial fraction of routers on the Internet -- about 30% -- and that IP timestamps can be used for a number of useful measurements: measuring parts of the reverse path a packet takes from server to client, identifying when two IP addresses belong to the same router, and measuring course-grained link latencies.

Reverse Traceroute

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IP Aliases

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Bachelor's Thesis

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Etc.

• Tiny Transactions on Computer Science is the premier research venue for computer science research in 140 characters or less.
• A long, rambling, mostly personal corpus of advice on applying to Computer Science grad school (by me for UWCSE students)
  • If you are a UW or Cal undergrad thinking about CS grad school, I'd be happy to talk to you in person (just email me). If you go to another school, I promise there are equivalent people to talk to at your institution (please contact them).
  • If you live in China, my friend Reynold wrote up this advice for students applying from abroad.
• Things that are worth reading:
  • The Loss of the Creature, by Walker Percy
  • Why Nerds are Unpopular, by Paul Graham
  • How to Be Alone, by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
  • Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet, by Clark, Wroclawski, Sollins, and Braden
• Seattle people really are coffee snobs; here's what I drink in Berkeley:
  • Best coffee in Berkeley
  • Best coffee near Soda
  • Best coffee for night time studying
  • Best coffee + brunch
  • Best hot chocolate / mocha
  • No thanks, I prefer tea.
• Elsewhere:
  • I keep a blog.
  • Facebook
  • Last.fm
  • Twitter
  • RenRen (no, I don't speak Chinese)
  • Wikipedia