Speaker:

Jiarong Xing

Talk Title:

Secure Runtime Programmable Networked Systems

Thursday April 4, 2024

Bahen Centre for Information Technology, BA 3200

This lecture is open to the public. No registration is required, but space is limited.

Abstract:

Networked systems have become foundational infrastructure for modern life. However, with diversifying applications and workloads, today’s systems are facing new challenges in security, manageability, and performance. My work builds upon advances in network programmability, which provides exciting opportunities for novel systems design. In this talk, I will first describe my work in architecting security protection into the network infrastructure, transforming it into a defense backbone. This leverages programmable network devices to perform per-packet inspection and real-time defense at hardware speeds. I will then describe my work in elevating static, compile-time programmability to runtime reconfiguration of network devices without downtime. Runtime programmability opens up new possibilities for runtime change management and performance optimization. Taken together, my work significantly increases the security, manageability, and performance of next-generation networked systems.

About Jiarong Xing:

Jiarong Xing is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University, advised by Ang Chen. His work spans security, systems, and networking, with a focus on enhancing the security and performance of networked systems, by leveraging and improving programmable hardware devices. His research has been published in USENIX Security, NSDI, SIGCOMM, Mobicom, SOSP, ASPLOS, and MLSys, and led to real-world  implementations and deployments by Nvidia and Bytedance. He has received the Google PhD Fellowship in Systems and Networking (2022), as well as a Distinguished Paper Award in USENIX Security (2023).