<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'><h1 class="page__title title" id="page-title">Bots, Bubbles, and Bottlenecks: Safeguarding the User’s Internet Experience</h1>Nick Feamster, Georgia Tech<br>Thursday, April 17, 4:30pm<br>Computer Science 105<br><br>A user's experience on the Internet rests in the hands of a large and
increasingly diverse set of stakeholders. Internet service providers
and content providers point fingers at one other about performance
problems. Miscreants launch attacks against both other users and
the Internet infrastructure itself. Content providers continually
engage in practices to "personalize" what we see and when we see it.
Many governments aim to control its citizens' access to information,
while activists design circumvention tools. Safeguarding the user's
Internet experience requires both gathering empirical network
measurements to detect threats (typically in the absence of any "ground
truth") and developing large-scale systems to mitigate them. In this
talk, I will present three classes of safeguards against different
threats to the user's Internet experience: (1) technologies to
characterize and improve performance in the Internet's "last mile",
including a worldwide deployment of home routers in around 200 home
networks and ongoing studies with the Federal Communications Commission;
(2) methods for lightweight and fast detection of message abuse, such
as spam, that have since been widely adopted by industry; and
(3) defenses against against information manipulation attacks, a new
class of attacks against personalization algorithms. I will also
discuss other such threats and how networking can draw from other
disciplines to tackle them.<br>
<br>
Nick Feamster is an associate professor in the College of Computing at
Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in
2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research
focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems,
with a focus on network operations, network security, and
censorship-resistant communication systems. In December 2008, he
received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists
and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably
spam filtering. His honors include the Technology Review 35 "Top Young
Innovators Under 35" award, the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, a Sloan
Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship,
the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, and award papers at the
SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (measuring Web performance
bottlenecks), SIGCOMM (network-level behavior of spammers), the NSDI
conference (fault detection in router configuration), Usenix Security
(circumventing web censorship using Infranet), and Usenix Security (web
cookie analysis).<div><span name="x"></span><br></div><br></div></body></html>