Sitemap

A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

portfolio

projects

FROOT: Future-Proof, Trustworthy Telemetry

With the growth of the Internet and its importance in supporting the US economy, business, health, education and other services, it is critical to ensure both high performance and high availability of the networks underlying it. Increasingly, such networks include a heterogeneous set of network switches and other devices which must be monitored and controlled in a coordinated manner. Emerging networked applications, such as cloud gaming or cloud streamed augmented reality, are expected to further stress both control systems and network monitoring by requiring real-time response to rapid changes in traffic workloads. This project aims to address the needs of future network control by enabling a network telemetry infrastructure that can provide timely, accurate, and trusted information about ongoing activities in the network.

ONSET: Optics-enabled Network Defenses for Extreme Terabit DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to present a clear and imminent danger to critical network infrastructures. DDoS attacks have increased in sophistication with advanced strategies to continuously adapt (e.g., changing threat postures dynamically) and induce collateral damage (i.e., higher latency and loss for legitimate traffic). Furthermore, advanced attacks may also employ reconnaissance (e.g., mapping the network to find bottleneck links) to target the network infrastructure itself. In light of these trends, state-of-art defenses (e.g., advanced scrubbing, emerging software-defined defenses, and programmable switching hardware) have fundamental shortcomings. This project will develop a new framework, referred to as “Optics-enabled In-Network defenSe for Extreme Terabit DDoS attacks” (ONSET). The framework makes a case for new dimensions of defense agility that can programmatically control the topology of the network (in addition to the processing behavior) to tackle advanced and future attacks. The project will facilitate the use of optical technologies as an exciting visual medium for engaging K-12 students via suitable channels for dissemination. The project will also result in new course materials at the intersection of optical networking, software-defined networking, and network security to enable students to become domain experts in this emerging problem space.

AI for Cloud Ops

Today’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) trends encourage rapid design of software using a wide range of customized, off-the-shelf, and legacy software components, followed by frequent updates that are immediately deployed on the cloud. Altogether, this component diversity and breakneck pace of development amplify the difficulty in identifying, localizing, or fixing problems related to performance, resilience, and security. Existing approaches that rely on human experts have limited applicability to modern CI/CD processes, as they are fragile, costly, and often not scalable.

Enabling Intelligent In-Network Computing for Cloud Systems

With the network infrastructure becoming highly programmable, it is time to rethink the role of networks in the cloud computing landscape beyond just packet delivery. The network itself emerges as a computing platform with a unique advantage of full network visibility. This project enables advanced approximate telemetry (e.g., sketches) with relevant applications on programmable networks (e.g., programmable switches, SmartNICs, and FPGAs) for cloud system management. Specifically, we will develop a cloud-native, approximate telemetry framework to offer low-overhead, fine-grained, real-time visibility into the underlying network traffic. Moving forward, this line of research with “intelligent” networking aims to provide insights and system abstractions to improve the performance, reliability, and security of cloud systems.

Privacy-Preserving, Automated Data Sharing Framework

Our conversations with leading cloud and AI vendors across market verticals (e.g., security, telemetry, finance) tell us that at every step along the way, lack of access to realistic and diverse data from multiple deployments hampers innovation. For instance, data-driven products trained on data not representative of real customer environment, there is no way to quantitatively assess products; machine learning workflows experiences data drift, and product feedback is not quantitative. The result today is poor products, lack of transparency, lots of effort in debugging/reproduction/resolution, and impossibility to share insights across diverse customers.

Scalable Learning from Distributed Data for Wireless Network Management

The transition to 5G is expected to witness not only an emergence of new applications such as mobile augmented and virtual reality, but also opens up the attack surface to both known, and previously unknown threats. Thus, wireless networks of the future will need better control and management at different temporal and traffic aggregation granularities (e.g., how to allocate spectrum, how to quarantine distributed attacks etc.). This project aims to develop scalable, machine learning based analytics on the data from a large set of geographically distributed wireless core network entities such as base stations. The research will enable new approaches for: (a) compressing the raw data via novel summaries and sketches, that reduce overhead while simultaneously enabling highly accurate scalable analytics (b) scalable yet highly flexible distributed learning approaches that are built upon the emerging federated learning paradigm and (c) flexible allocation of bandwidth to support the control plane analytics that minimizes the impact on the data plane.

publications

talks

teaching

Introduction to Computer Networking

Undergraduate course, Boston University, ECE, 2021

Topics covered in this course will include application layer protocols (e.g., HTTP, FTP, SMTP), transport layer protocols (UDP, TCP), network layer protocols (e.g., IP, ICMP), link layer protocols (e.g., Ethernet) and wireless protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11). The course will also cover routing protocols such as link state and distance vector, multicast routing, and path vector protocols (e.g., BGP). The class will examine security issues such as firewalls and denial of service attacks. We will also study DNS, NAT, Web caching and CDNs, peer to peer, and protocol tunneling. Finally, we will explore security protocols (e.g., TLS, SSH, IPsec), as well as some basic cryptography necessary to understand these. Grading will be based on hands-on programming assignments and two exams.

Advanced Computer Networking

PhD Seminar, Boston University, ECE, 2021

The Internet today carries a great volume and variety of data to enable new waves of innovation. This course is to explore the principles and design decisions which underly the Internet. It provides a comprehensive overview of advanced topics in network protocols and networked systems. Lectures will cover both classic papers on Internet protocols and recent research advances. The course aims to examine a wide range of topics, e.g., switching and routing, congestion control, network architectures, data center networks, network virtualization, software-defined networking, and programmable networks, with an emphasis on core networking concepts and principles. The concepts will be reinforced with paper discussions, programming assignments, and a final project.

Cloud Computing

Undergraduate and Graduate, Boston University, ECE, CS, 2022

The course aims to explore several fundamental topics of cloud computing, including IaaS (e.g., Open Stack), key big data platforms, and datacenter networking. The course combines group reading and discussion of influential publications in the field, lectures by the instructor, talks by invited speakers, and a large project. In particular, the students will be a part of an agile team, with extensive experience with GitHub, agile tools, and various technologies. The project will be done by teams of 3 to 5 students working with a mentor, depending on the project, an industry leader and/or engineer with a relevant project, or a senior graduate student or a postdoc working on a relevant research project. Projects may use the Mass Open Cloud or industry clouds (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc.)

Advanced Topics in Cloud Networking and Computing

Graduate Seminar, University of Maryland, CS, 2023

The course aims to explore latest advances in cloud networking and computing in light of emerging workloads (e.g., machine learning and large-scale analytics), including communication platforms, compute parallelism, and datacenter networking. The class will discuss the latest developments in the entire networking stack, the interactions between networks and high-level applications, and their connections with other system components such as compute and storage. The course combines group readings and presentations of influential publications in the field, lectures by the instructor, talks by invited speakers, and a project etc.

Cloud Computing

Undergraduate, University of Maryland, CS, 2024

The course explores several fundamental topics of cloud computing, including IaaS (e.g., Open Stack, Kubernetes), key big data platforms, and data center networking. The course combines group reading and discussion of influential publications in the field, lectures by the instructor, talks by invited speakers, and a large project. Students will be a part of an agile development team, with extensive experience with GitHub, agile tools, and various technologies. Each course project is solicited from open-source community and will be mentored by an industry leader and/or engineer, or a senior graduate student/postdoc. A project is expected to be done by teams of 3 to 5 students working with a mentor. Projects may use public clouds from our industry partners.

Advanced Topics in Cloud Networking and Computing

Graduate Seminar, University of Maryland, CS, 2025

The course aims to explore latest advances in cloud networking and computing in light of emerging workloads (e.g., large-scale data analytics), including communication platforms, compute parallelism, and datacenter networking. The class will discuss the latest developments in the entire networking stack, the interactions between networks and high-level applications, and their connections with other system components such as compute and storage. The course combines group readings and presentations of influential publications in the field, lectures by the instructor, talks by invited speakers, and a project etc.