Oakland'11 papers

At this year's IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy we presented two papers.

The first presents an extensive measurement study our team of 15 researchers, postdocs and graduate students at UCSD and ICSI has worked on for two years. It expands the analysis of the spam value chain into the financial domain, illuminates the affiliate program landscape for pharmaceuticals, replica goods, and software, and identifies three banks that together receive the credit card transactions of 95% of the spam we observe.

• K. Levchenko, A. Pitsillidis, N. Chachra, B. Enright, M. Felegyhazi, C. Grier, T. Halvorson, C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, H. Liu, D. McCoy, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage. Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

The second paper presents Monarch, a real-time system that crawls URLs as they are submitted to web services and determines whether the URLs direct to spam. The paper evaluates the fundamental challenges that arise due to the diversity of web service spam. Monarch could protect a service such as Twitter—which needs to process 15 million URLs/day—for a bit under $800/day.

• K. Thomas, C. Grier, J. Ma, V. Paxson and D. Song. Monarch: Providing Real-Time URL Spam Filtering as a Service. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

SIGCOMM awards

ACM has awarded this year's SIGCOMM award to Vern Paxson, for his seminal contributions to the fields of Internet measurement and Internet security, and for distinguished leadership and service to the Internet community.

SIGCOMM's Test-Of-Time Award recognizes papers published at least ten years ago that have turned out to make significant contributions to the field of networking. This year one of the two papers chosen is "A Scalable Content-addressable Network" which appeared in SIGCOMM 2001 and is authored by current and past ICSI researchers Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp and Scott Shenker.

Bro Internship

The Bro project is looking for an intern this summer as well.

Summer Internships

The Networking Group is now accepting applications for Summer 2011 internships. Applicants should be Ph.D. students with a solid research background in networking and/or security. To apply, send a resume to summer@icir.org, and arrange for a letter of reference to be sent to that address too. The deadline for applications is March 18, 2011.