Nik Sultana, PhD
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
| Contact: nsultana1 at(symbol) iit dot edu | CV |
I'm interested in building better (performance + flexibility + security) distributed systems, and I develop techniques for this using programming theory, formal logic, and systems engineering.
Bio: Before joining Illinois Tech I was a postdoc at the UPenn Distributed Systems Lab and at the Cambridge Systems Research Group where I worked on various research projects on computer systems. Up to my PhD I did theoretical research. For my PhD I developed a compiler-based approach to proof translation, and before that I worked on constructive proof search and the verification of refactorings using interactive theorem-proving. I did my undergrad at the University of Malta.
Research Opportunities
If you're an Illinois Tech student, check out my page on BS/MS student projects related to my research.Regardless of whether you're currently an Illinois Tech student, you can find out more about funded PhD opportunities related to my research. You can find out more about my research by browsing this homepage.
Survey on packet filtering
If you use or develop packet filters then please complete this survey. The survey's goal is to poll the current usage of, and problems with, traffic filtering and packet monitoring tools. The results will help guide new academic research and will be shared with the research community.Resources
Feel free to reach out to me about the following resources which I created and curate:- The Networked Systems Tech Talks is open to all regardless of affiliation.
- General list of IIT- and Chicago-related Resources.
- Computer Science research mailing list at IIT.
Recent
- September 2023. Alexander, Nishanth, and I are presenting a short paper at INDIS'23.
- September 2023. If you're attending the upcoming FABRIC KNIT workshop then do check out the demos by Mohammad, Sean and Nishanth!
- September 2023. New version of Caper released, with inputs from Hyunsuk, Marelle and Aditi!
- September 2023. Congrats Yun for her C2ST blog post about her CS543 project.
- August 2023. Congrats Mohammad and Sean for their C2ST blog post about attending KNIT6.
- July 2023. Launched site for Caper at http://caper.cs.iit.edu/ which features a Filter Filtering quiz!
- April 2023. Honored to receive a URA VSP award that funds more work with collaborators at Fermilab.
- March 2023. Congrats to Mohammad for his poster at HotSoS! At HotSoS I'll also be giving two presentations about recent work: PERA (HotNets'22) and Pitchfork (ACSAC'22).
- February 2023. Congrats to Cyprien for his AnNet paper on semantic forwarding (repo, TR), and Henry and Junyong for their APDCM paper on C-Saw (repo, TR)!
- January 2023. Launched site for the networked systems tech talks.
- November 2022. Launched project site for the Pitchfork project.
- October 2022. Paper accepted at the EuroP4 workshop -- congrats to Shivam and our collaborators!
- October 2022. Released code and examples from the Pitchfork project.
- October 2022. Giving short talk at OCP FTS, and a demo at ICNP 2022.
Research interests
Distributed systems, Programmable networking, Security (software and network), Automated reasoning, Formal methods.
Acknowledgement for research funding/support:
DARPA, Google, RES-MATCH, URA, XUP.
I'm also very grateful to the FABRIC and Chameleon testbeds for enabling some of my group's work.
Teaching
- Fall'23: CS595 (Applications of Programmable Networking).
- Spring'23: CS543/ITM595-05 (Software-Defined Networking)
- Fall'22: CS351 (Systems Programming)
- Spring'22: CS595/ITM595 (Designing Large-Scale Networked Systems)
- Spring'22: CS695 (Doctoral Seminar)
Group
- (Undergrad) Hyunsuk Bang
- (Undergrad) Sean Cummings
- (Undergrad) Aditi Kumar
- (Undergrad) Marelle León
- (Undergrad) Mohammad Firas Sada
- (RSE) Nishanth Shyamkumar
- (RES-MATCH) Prajwal Somendyapanahalli Venkateshmurthy
See my page on funded opportunities for a PhD in Computer Science related to my research.
If you're already at Illinois Tech, I'm happy to discuss undergrad (CS49{1,7}) and MS (CS59{1,7}) projects. Also see my current list of student projects.Previously at Illinois Tech I worked with Neil Dhote, Xue Zhang, Rigden Atsatsang, Mohamad Dib Fares, Luis Casarrubios Elez, Cyprien Gueyraud, Simrat Kaur, Irina Klein, Shivam Patel, H. E. Greenblatt, and Alexander Wolosewicz.
Earlier, at the University of Pennsylvania I worked with the following Research Assistants: Achala Rao, Zihao Jin (visiting from Tsinghua University), Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Shilpi Bose, Henry Zhu, Ke Zhong (visiting from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, now a PhD student at Penn), Zhaoyang Han, Ruijie Mao, Digvijaysinh Chauhan, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad, Zhilei Zheng, Garvit Khandelwal, Ritvik Sadana, Rakesh Nagda, Heena Nagda (from Georgia Tech), Stephen Carrasquillo, Junyong Zhao, Saket, Andrew Zhao, and Aishwarya Wesanekar.
And before that at the University of Cambridge I supervised Jonny Shipton's 2016 UROP (research internship) and the "Part II" (undergrad dissertation) projects of Thomas Le Feuvre, Radu Voroneanu (co-supervised with Lucas Dixon), Daniel Spencer (co-supervised with Richard Mortier), and Rupert Horlick (co-supervised with Richard Mortier).
Projects & System Releases
Flightplan (2020, on GitHub)
Emu (2017, on GitHub)
Flowdar (2019, on GitLab)
Pax (2016, on GitHub) and projects that build on top of it: TCPuny and Recap.
DoSarray (2018, on GitHub)
Motto (2016, on GitHub)
Smaller systems:
Most of my work is released as open source. For other projects see my GitHub and GitLab.
Publications
These are indexed at DBLP and Google Scholar.
Recent work:
- Towards Practical Application-level Support for Privilege Separation. (ACSAC 2022)
Paper Code Site Slides Cite - In-Network Fractional Calculations using P4 for Scientific Computing workloads. (EuroP4 2022)
Paper Code Technical Report Data Cite - A Case for Remote Attestation in Programmable Dataplanes. (HotNets 2022)
Paper Cite - Experiment Planning for Heterogeneous Programmable Networks. (TEPN 2022)
Paper Cite - IPC Evolution thru Declarative Interface Generation. (DAI-SNAC 2021)
Paper Cite - Leveraging In-Network Application Awareness. (NAI 2021)
Paper Video Slides Cite - Meta-level issues in Offloading: Scoping, Composition,Development, and their Automation. (LATTE 2021)
Paper Video Cite - FDP: A Teaching and Demonstration Platform for Networking. (SIGCSE 2021)
Abstract Site Demo Video Cite - Flightplan: Dataplane Disaggregation and Placement for P4 Programs. (NSDI 2021)
Paper Code Site Video Slides Demo Demo Write-up Cite - Debugging strongly-compartmentalized distributed systems. (APDCM 2020)
Paper Video Cite - Trace-based Behaviour Analysis of Network Servers. (CNSM 2019)
Paper Code Poster Cite - My short essay on bounded latency made it to the finals of the Tipping Point Prize!
- Hashtray: Turning the tables on Scalable Client Classification. (AnNet 2019)
Paper Code Cite - What we talk about when we talk about pcap expressions. (Real-World DSLs 2019)
Paper Code Run online Cite - DoSarray: An extensible evaluation system for DoS research. (COMSNETS 2019)
Paper Code Data Cite - Making Break-ups Less Painful: Source-level Support for Transforming Legacy Software into a Network of Tasks. (FEAST 2018)
Paper Cite - In-network computing to the rescue of faulty links. (NetCompute 2018)
Paper Slides Cite - Chapter on "Codebreaking after the Second World War" with Markulf Kohlweiss and Tony Hoare for the booklet that accompanies the Codebreakers and Groundbreakers exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2017.
- Report on Networking and Programming Languages 2017. (CCR)
Write-up Cite - Emu: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Services. (ATC 2017)
Paper Code Cite - Extending programs with debug-related features, with application to hardware development.
Draft Cite - Kneecap: model-based generation of network traffic. (SMT 2016)
Paper Code Cite - Light at the middle of the tunnel: middleboxes for selective disclosure of network monitoring to distrusted parties. (HotMiddlebox 2016)
Paper Cite - FLICK: Developing and Running Application-Specific Network Services. (ATC 2016)
Paper Code Cite
Videos (Demos/Talks)
PERA Paper (talk @ HotNets'22) |
PERA Slides (talk @ HotSoS'23) |
Pitchfork Slides (talk @ HotSoS'23) |
Position paper (talk @ LATTE'21) |
Flightplan (talk @ NSDI'21) |
FDP |
Wharf (talk @ NetCompute'18) |
Flightplan (talk @ ONF'18) |
Emu (talk @ BCS AIPG seminar, 2017) |