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.

Recent

• 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.
• September 2022. Paper on PERA accepted at HotNets, and paper on Pitchfork accepted at ACSAC!

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.

Teaching

• Fall'23 (Upcoming): CS595 (Applications of Programmable Networking).
  There are both in-person and online sections.
• 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)

Students

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 and Shivam Patel.

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

Pitchfork (2022, on GitLab) Decomposition of C programs for privilege separation.

Flightplan (2020, on GitHub) Decomposition & heterogeneous allocation of P4 programs to benefit SDN.

Emu (2017, on GitHub) New standard library for creating high-performance network functions using HLS.

Flowdar (2019, on GitLab) Understanding the flow of control, data, and resource-usage of software.

Pax (2016, on GitHub) and projects that build on top of it: TCPuny and Recap. Abstractions for packet-processors written in high-level & managed languages.

DoSarray (2018, on GitHub) Carrying out experiments involving Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and mitigations.

Motto (2016, on GitHub) Compiler and reference runtime for the Flick system for application-level services.

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)