Short Bio

I received my Diplom in Computer Science in 2002, from TUM. I then completed the Ph.D. program at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. There, I was one of the brains juggled by Jon Crowcroft, my supervisor and pub coach. In 2006 I moved on to ICIR, where I am a staff research scientist. My research focuses on topics in network architecture, distributed systems, and network security. I'm German, though they say I have a sense of humor.

Conferences & Workshops

PC member:

Chairing and other organizational work:

Recent Publications

More here, including forthcoming work.

• GQ: Practical Containment for Measuring Modern Malware Systems pdf bib

  C. Kreibich, N. Weaver, C. Kanich, W. Cui, V. Paxson. Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2011, Berlin, Germany.

  This paper presents the malware habitat that enabled all of our botnet infiltrations and spam harvests, and also describes lessons learned from 5+ years of building and (safely!) running one of the most wretched hives of malware scum and villainy around.

• Measuring Pay-per-Install: The Commoditization of Malware Distribution pdf bib 9 citations

  C. Grier, J. Caballero, C. Kreibich, V. Paxson. USENIX Security Symposium, 2011, San Francisco, USA.

  MIT Technology Review article on this work. 09.06.11

  We scored an outstanding paper award at the conference. 10.08.11

• Redirecting DNS for Ads and Profit pdf bib

  N. Weaver, C. Kreibich, V. Paxson. USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), 2011, San Francisco, USA.

  This paper in part describes the unfolding story of some US ISPs using technology by a company called Paxfire to hijack web search queries for monetization through marketing affiliate programs. Read more at New Scientist, EFF, BoingBoing, Slashdot, or the Inquirer. You can also follow it over on the Netalyzr blog.

• Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain pdf bib 18 citations

  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. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

  Read more details about this work here.

• Netalyzr: Illuminating The Edge Network pdf bib 19 citations

  C. Kreibich, N. Weaver, B. Nechaev, V. Paxson. Internet Measurement Conference (IMC, full paper), 2010, Melbourne, Australia.

  This paper has co-won the FCC's Open Internet Research Challenge. Read more about the award here. 05.08.11

  For more details on this work, please check out the Netalyzr website.

Press Coverage

News articles I was interviewed for.

• Forscher nehmen Produktpiraten und Finanzhäuser ins Visier
  Neue Zürcher Zeitung Online 23.06.11
• What's the Harm If I Get What I Pay For?
  Messaging News 16.06.11
• How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine's fate
  BBC News 29.03.10
• Researchers Develop a More Accurate Spam Filter
  Chronicle of Higher Education 27.01.10
• Spam Grows Up
  Berkeley Science Review 01.03.09

Projects

Priv3 » practical third-party privacy for the social web

Click Trajectories » end-to-end analysis of the spam value chain

Netalyzr » debug your internet

Spamalytics » measuring spam conversion

Bro » ultra-flexible traffic analysis

CCIED » fighting internet epidemics

Honeycomb » automatic signature generation

Miscellaneous

How spam works » a real-world spam transaction

Browser use over the course of a day

Adsense's JavaScript dissected

Software

Rich Stevens' sock program

libstree » generic suffix trees

Netdude » pluggable trace manipulation

Broccoli » let Bro talk to anything

cache.h » an STL-style cache (painful!)

A parser for Google Scholar