Networks and Systems Security Lab

Network Security and Measurement

Securing the networks of tomorrow begins with understanding how they behave today. Our research in Network Security and Measurement bridges two critical and complementary areas:

Empirical analysis of real-world mobile and satellite network performance, and

Foundational security research, including DDoS mitigation and rethinking network trust models.

On the measurement side, we conduct extensive, real-world studies of mobile networks—spanning terrestrial 5G and satellite systems—to reveal how geography, mobility, and infrastructure impact performance. These insights are essential to informing infrastructure planning, policy decisions, and application design for next-generation connectivity, especially in high-mobility and underserved regions.

On the security front, we focus on both practical and architectural challenges. Our group has led comprehensive analyses of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) defense strategies, uncovering common design patterns and systemic limitations across decades of research. We highlight not only the technical challenges but also the economic and deployment factors that influence which solutions succeed in practice—providing a more realistic and actionable understanding of the DDoS defense landscape.

Beyond mitigating existing threats, we also rethink how security and trust should be built into future networks. Traditional IP-based security models rely on static, centralized mechanisms that struggle in dynamic environments like virtualized cellular cores. We explore data-centric security paradigms, particularly Named Data Networking (NDN), which embed trust directly into the data itself. This shift supports fine-grained, scalable, and tenant-aware security models, better suited to the elastic and service-oriented nature of modern and future mobile networks.

Together, our work provides both a ground-truth understanding of modern network behavior and a vision for how these systems can be secured by design. We contribute not only to the academic understanding of mobile network systems but also to the development of practical solutions that help shape resilient, trustworthy, and high-performing communication infrastructures.

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