Systems, Networking, and Architecture

Faculty: Benjamin Ujcich

Our faculty are driving the evolution of future network architectures, with a powerful emphasis on software-defined networking (SDN) and programmable networks. Professor Benjamin Ujcich pioneered foundational security analyses of both programmable control planes managing distributed network applications and programmable data planes. This threat modeling and vulnerability discovery has yielded over 20 CVEs in open-source production network controllers, directly hardening infrastructure used worldwide. Beyond immediate defenses, our researchers are charting the next generation of intent-based networking (IBN) to understand the security, verification, and performance implications of declaratively specified networks. This work is consistently recognized at top venues, with research appearing in top-tier networking and security venues such as ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE NetSoft, and Communications of the ACM.

Faculty: Micah Sherr and Benjamin Ujcich

Our faculty study critical domains of network security, privacy, anonymity, and Internet censorship resistance. Co-directed by Professor Micah Sherr, the department’s SecLab serves as a hub for designing robust privacy-preserving technologies, operating system protections, and advanced network intrusion detection systems. Faculty research directly impacts real-world democratic infrastructure, having participated in two large-scale studies of electronic voting machines that successfully disclosed architectural vulnerabilities in deployed U.S. election systems. Our faculty are focused on analyzing the sophisticated methods used by nation-states to restrict online access to information, while simultaneously engineering next-generation, censorship-resistant technologies designed to evade these wiretap and eavesdropping systems. By tackling these pressing adversarial threats, our faculty works to ensure secure, private, and open communication architectures globally.

Faculty: Nitin Vaidya

Our faculty are pioneering foundational advancements in distributed systems, with a particular focus on distributed learning, fault-tolerant algorithms, and wireless networking. This research is championed by Professor Nitin Vaidya, an IEEE Fellow whose work ensures that large-scale, interconnected systems remain resilient, efficient, and secure even in the presence of component failures. His cutting-edge contributions at the intersection of mobile computing and distributed consensus have earned best paper awards at premier conferences, including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, SSS, and ICDCN. Beyond foundational research, our faculty actively shapes the broader international computing community, lending their leadership as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R, as well as Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC).

Faculty: Radha Venkatagiri