I submitted my Ph.D. dissertation during the Fall'06 quarter and have officially
graduated. I am currently working at a
cool
startup company founded by three other Ph.D. students from the Stanford CS
department.
While at Stanford, I was a member of the
Distributed Systems
Group (DSG), led by prof. David Cheriton. My main interests include
distributed systems, networking, operating systems, and computer architecture.
Most of my research while at Stanford was focused on building self-managed
wireless LANs as part of the
KIWI project.
More specifically, my dissertation focused on securing wireless LANs using
location-based services instead of relying on long-term secrets such as user
passwords and certificates. For instance, I have designed and implemented:
- A signal strength-based localization system that requires no manual
configuration and is able to locate mobile clients with a median error of
1.8 meters in our test deployment. It was designed to reject solutions
for which it has low confidence, so it can be used to implement location-based
access control;
- Range-based authentication: a mechanism that exploits receiver
sensitivity constraints to limit network connectivity only to those devices
physically located within the desired network range. As clients act as
receivers during authentication, considerable antenna gain is required to extend
the authentication range.
- Signalprint-based attack detection: a mechanism that allows networks to
differentiate between distinct devices even in the face of MAC address
spoofing. Our mechanism assigns to each transmitter a signal strength pattern,
which we call a signalprint, that functions as a robust
location-based device identifier.
You can find more information about my research by reading one of my
papers or visiting the homepage for the
KIWI project.
Things you can blame me for:
- Co-organizer of the Stanford Networking Seminar,
2005-06, 2004-05, 2003-04;
- Co-organizer of TGIF, the weekly gathering of CS people at Stanford,
2002-03;
"The whole of science is nothing more than a
refinement of everyday thinking." -- Albert Einstein