Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

Leveraging Social Feedback to Verify Online Identity Claims
Michael Sirivianos, Kyungbaek Kim, Jian Wei Gan and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Volume 9, No. 4, March, 2014

Ads-Portal Domains: Identification and Measurements
Mishari Almishari and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Volume 4, No. 2, April, 2010
A measurement study on the prevalence of ads-portal domains and their characteristics: 5% of DNS queries in our traces are for ads-portal domains.

Robust and Efficient Incentives for Cooperative Content Distribution
Michael Sirivianos, Xiaowei Yang and Stanislaw Jarecki
In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), Volume 17, Issue 6, Dec. 2009
A hybrid incentive scheme that combines cryptographic fair exchange with optimistic tit-for-tat.

Improving XCP to Achieve Max-Min Fair Bandwidth Allocation
Xiaowei Yang, Yanbin LU and Lei Zan
In Computer Networks, Volume 54, Issue 3, Feb. 2009
A window-based congestion control protocol that achieves max-min fairness in steady state.

TVA: A DoS-limiting Network Architecture
Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson
In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), Volume 16, Issue 6, Dec. 2008.
A maturer version of TVA. It has a relatively complete implementation in Click.

NIRA: A New Routing Architecture
Xiaowei Yang, David Clark, and Arthur Berger
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Network (ToN), Volume 15, Issue 4, Aug. 2007.
A routing system that scalably supports source-selected inter-ISP routes.

Refereed Conference and Workshop Publications

Regional IP Anycast: Deployments, Performance, and Potentials
Minyuan Zhou, Xiao Zhang, Shuai Hao, Xiaowei Yang, Jiaqi Zheng, Guihai Chen, and Wanchun Dou
In ACM SIGCOMM 2023

Quantifying User Password Exposure to Third-Party CDNs
Rui Xin, Shihan Lin, Xiaowei Yang
In PAM 2023 (Passive and Active Measurement Conference)

Remote Procedure Call as a Managed System Service
Jingrong Chen*, Yongji Wu*, Shihan Lin, Yechen Xu, Xinhao Kong, Thomas Anderson, Matthew Lentz, Xiaowei Yang, Danyang Zhuo (*equal contribution)
In USENIX NSDI 2023 (Networked Systems Design and Implementation)

InviCloak: An End-to-End Approach to Privacy and Performance in Web Content Distribution
Shihan Lin, Rui Xin, Aayush Goel, and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM CCS 2022 (ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

Characterizing Physical-Layer Transmission Errors in Cable Broadband Networks
Jiyao Hu, Zhenyu Zhou, Xiaowei Yang
In USENIX NSDI 2022 (Networked Systems Design and Implementation)

Speeding Up TCP with Selective Loss Prevention
Zhenyu Zhou and Xiaowei Yang
In 2nd Workshop on New Internetworking Protocols, Architecture and Algorithms (NIPAA'21) organized by ICNP, 2021

AnyOpt: Predicting and Optimizing IP Anycast Performance
Xiao Zhang, Tanmoy Sen, Zheyuan Zhang, Tim April, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, David Choffnes, Bruce M. Maggs, Haiying Shen, Ramesh K. Sitaraman, and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM SIGCOMM 2021

CableMon: Improving the Reliability of Cable Broadband Networks via Proactive Network Maintenance
Jiyao Hu, Zhenyu Zhou, Xiaowei Yang, Jacob Malone, and Jonathan Williams
In USENIX NSDI 2020

DynaShield: Reducing the Cost of DDoS Defense using Cloud Services
Shengbao Zheng and Xiaowei Yang
In USENIX HotCloud’19, July 2019

Trigger Relationship Aware Mobile Traffic Classification
Heyi Tang, Yong Cui, Jianping Wu, Xiaowei Yang, and Zhenjie Yang
In IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service, June 2019

SwitchMan: An Easy-to-Use Approach to Secure User Input and Output
Shengbao Zheng, Zhenyu Zhou, Heyi Tang, and Xiaowei Yang
In IEEE International Workshop on Privacy Engineering, May 2019

FOCUS: Function Offloading from a Controller to Utilize Switch Power
Ji Yang, Zhenyu Zhou, Theophilus Benson, Xiaowei Yang, Xin Wu, and Chengchen Hu
In IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks, Nov 2016.

Combating Friend Spam Using Social Rejections
Qiang Cao, Michael Sirivianos, Xiaowei Yang, and Kamesh Munagala
In IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), June 2015.

Uncovering Large Groups of Active Malicious Accounts in Online Social Networks
Qiang Cao, Xiaowei Yang, Jieqi Yu, and Christopher Palow
In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2014

In-Network Compute Extensions for Rate-Adaptive Content Delivery in Mobile Network
Francesco Bronzino, Chao Han, Yang Chen, Kiran Nagaraja, Xiaowei Yang, Ivan Seskar, and Dipankar Raychaudhuri
In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computer and Networking Experimental Research using Testbeds (CNERT'14), co-located with IEEE ICNP 2014, Oct. 2014

PacketCloud: an Open Platform for Elastic In-network Services
Yang Chen, Binyang Liu, Yu Chen, Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, and Jun Bi
In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MobiArch'13), Oct. 2013

NetPilot: Automating Datacenter Network Failure Mitigation
Xin Wu, Daniel Turner, George Chen, Dave Maltz, Xiaowei Yang, Lihua Yuan, and Ming Zhang
In ACM SIGCOMM 2012
Netpilot uses automated failure mitigation to quickly respond to and mask the effects of network failures before network operators fully repair them.

DARD: Distributed Adaptive Routing for Datacenter Networks
Xin Wu and Xiaowei Yang
In IEEE ICDCS 2012
End systems can use DARD to load-balance their traffic among the multiple paths available in a datacenter network without a centralized controller.

Aiding the Detection of Fake Accounts in Large Scale Social Online Services
Qiang Cao, Michael Sirivianos, Xiaowei Yang, and Tiago Pregueiro
In ACM/USENIX NSDI, Apr. 2012
Describes SybilRank, a fast and effective system that helps detect fake accounts in real social networks.

Assessing the Veracity of Identity Assertions via OSNs
Michael Sirivianos, Kyungbaek Kim, Jian Wei Gan, and Xiaowei Yang
In Intl Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), Jan. 2012

Bootstrapping Accountability in the Internet We Have
Ang Li, Xin Liu, and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM/USENIX NSDI, Mar. 2011
Describes how to secure the Internet with a few adoptable changes.

Introducing Social Trust to Collaborative Spam Mitigation
Michael Sirivianos, Kyungbaek Kim, and Xiaowei Yang
In IEEE INFOCOM, July 2011
Studies how social trust may improve the accuracy of spam filtering.

CloudCmp: Comparing Public Cloud Providers
Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, Srikanth Kandula, and Ming Zhang
In ACM/Internet Measurement Conference, Nov. 2010
A systematic comparison on the performance and cost of four public cloud providers: Amazon AWS, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and RackSpace CloudServers.

NetFence: Preventing Internet Denial of Service from Inside Out
Xin Liu, Xiaowei Yang, and Yong Xia
In ACM SIGCOMM, Aug. 2010
A scalable DoS solution that guarantees per-sender fairness without keeping per-host state in the core network in the worst case where sender/receiver pairs collude to flood the network

SocialFilter: Introducing Social Trust to Collaborative Spam Mitigation
Michael Sirivianos, Kyungbaek Kim, and Xiaowei Yang
In USENIX Workshop on Collaborative Methods for Security and Privacy (CollSec), Aug. 2010

CloudCmp: Shopping for a Cloud Made Easy
Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, Srikanth Kandula, and Ming Zhang
In USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), June 2010

SafeGuard: Safe Forwarding during Route Changes
Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, and David Wetherall
In ACM CoNext, Dec. 2009
A practical routing system that uses packets that carry the remaining path costs to destinations to achieve near zero-disruption routing for anticipated network failures.

Internet Protocol Made Accountable
Xiaowei Yang and Xin Liu
In ACM HotNets-VIII, Oct. 2009
Outlining how to bootstrap accountability in the Internet without overhauling the present Internet.

FaceTrust: Assessing the Credibility of Online Personas via Social Networks
Michael Sirivianos, Kyungbaek Kim, and Xiaowei Yang
In Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec), 2009
Addressing the problem "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog."

Auction, but Don't Block
Xiaowei Yang
In ACM SIGCOMM NetEcon workshop, Aug. 2008
A design that uses packet-level auction to address the network neutrality issue.

To Filter or to Authorize: Network-Layer DoS Defense Against Multimillion-node Botnets
Xin Liu, Xiaowei Yang, and Yanbin Lu
In ACM SIGCOMM, Aug. 2008
This paper presents the design and implementation of StopIt, a filter-based DoS defense system built on Passport, and compares it with capability-based systems.

Poking Facebook: Characterization of OSN Applications
Minas Gjoka and Michael Sirivianos and Athina Markopoulou and Xiaowei Yang
In ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN) 2008
A measurement study of how users adopt applications on Facebook.

Passport: Secure and Adoptable Source Authentication
Xin Liu, Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, and David Wetherall
In USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, 2008
A system that uses light-weight cryptography to prevent source address spoofing.

On Improving the Efficiency and Manageability of NotVia
Ang Li, Pierre Francois, and Xiaowei Yang
ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), Dec. 2007.
A few tricks that make NotVia (an IP Fast Reroute proposal) more efficient and practical.

Dandelion: Cooperative Content Distribution with Robust Incentives
Michael Sirivianos, Jong Han Park, Xiaowei Yang and Stanislaw Jarecki
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2007.
A content distribution system that uses a lightweight cryptographic fair exchange scheme to provide non-manipulable incentives.

Improving XCP to Achieve Max-Min Fair Bandwidth Allocation
Lei Zan and Xiaowei Yang
IFIP/TC6 NETWORKING, 2007.
Fixes XCP to achieve steady-state max-min fair in the presence of multiple bottlenecks. Proof is included in this longer version.

Free-riding in BitTorrent Networks with the Large View Exploit
Michael Sirivianos, Jong Han Park, Rex Chen, and Xiaowei Yang
the 6th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS), 2007.
Shows that a free-rider in BitTorrent swarms can achieve reasonable performance if it can obtain a large number of peers.

Evaluation of IP Fast Reroute Proposals
Minas Gjoka, Vinayak Ram, and Xiaowei Yang
IEEE/Create-Net/ICST International Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and MiddlewaRE (COMSWARE), Jan. 2007.
An early study on comparing various IP Fast Reroute techniques.

A Technical Approach to Net Neutrality
Xiaowei Yang, Gene Tsudik, and Xin Liu
ACM HotNets-V, Irvine, CA, Nov 2006. Talk
A proposal to use IP anonymization and encryption to defeat traffic discrimination.

Source Selectable Path Diversity via Routing Deflections
Xiaowei Yang and David Wetherall
ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy, September 2006.
Using a few header bits and simple extensions to shortest-path forwarding to exponentially increase path diversity.

Efficient and Secure Source Authentication with Packet Passports
Xin Liu, Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson
2nd USENIX Steps to Reduce Unwanted Traffic on the Internet workshop (SRUTI 2006), July 2006.
Describes an early design of the Passport system.

Dandelion: Cooperative Content Distribution with Robust Incentives
Michael Sirivianos, Xiaowei Yang, and Stanislaw Jarecki
1st Workshop on the Economics of Networked Systems (NetEcon06), June 2006.
Describe an early design of Dandelion.

A DoS-limiting Network Architecture
Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson
ACM SIGCOMM, Philadelphia, PA, August 2005.
Describes TVA, a capability-based DoS limiting network architecture.

Compact Routing on Internet-like Graphs
Dmitri Krioukov, Kevin Fall, and Xiaowei Yang.
IEEE INFOCOM, Mar. 2004.
Studies the stretch and routing table compression ratio of a compact routing algorithm and shows that it works well on Internet-like topologies.

NIRA: A New Internet Routing Architecture
Xiaowei Yang
ACM SIGCOMM FDNA Workshop, Aug. 2003. TALK
Describes an early design of NIRA.

Designing Traffic Profiles for Bursty Internet Traffic
Xiaowei Yang
IEEE Global Internet, Taipei, Taiwan, Nov. 2002.
A traffic profile that combines a short-term and a long-term token bucket to police heavy tailed traffic.

A Passive Approach for Detecting Shared Bottlenecks
Dina Katabi, Issam Bazzi, and Xiaowei Yang
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Nov. 2001.
Applies machine learning algorithms to cluster flows that share the same bottleneck using packet arrival times.

A Framework for Semantic Service Discovery
Xiaowei Yang
MIT Student Oxygen Workshop, Aug. 2001.
Proposes a semantic service discovery framework in a ubiquitous computing environment. See also the longer version.

A Model for Window Based Flow Control in Packet-Switched Networks
Xiaowei Yang
IEEE INFOCOM, Mar. 1999.
Describes an analytic model that predicts the steady-state throughput of multiple TCP flows in a network.

Refereed Posters and short abstracts

The Personal Router
Steven Bauer, George Lee, Indraneel Chakraborty, Xavier Brucker, Xiaowei Yang, Ben Leong, and John Wroclawski
Student poster, in ACM MobiCom, Sept. 2002

Unspoofable Source Identifiers without Global Trust
Xin Liu, Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall and Thomas Anderson
Student poster in ACM SIGCOMM, Aug. 2006.

Non-refereed Publications

NIRA: A New Internet Routing Architecture
Xiaowei Yang
Phd thesis, MIT-LCS-TR-967, Sept. 2004. This version has minor modifications to the submitted one.

Workshop Report: Future directions in Network Architecture
Steven Bauer and Xiaowei Yang
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review (CCR), 33(5):89-98, 2003

A Model for Window Based Flow Control Packet-Switched Networks
Xiaowei Yang
Master thesis, MIT-LCS-TR-765, Mar. 1998

Other technical writings

The Interchangeability Study of ADSL and the Cable Modem
Xiaowei Yang, Sept. 2002.
This project answers the question "how fast is fast enough" for web surfing.

Ontologies and How to Build Them
Xiaowei Yang, Mar. 2001.

A Framework for Semantic Service Discovery
Xiaowei Yang, June 2001.
Proposes a semantic service discovery framework in a ubiquitous computing environment.

Inferring Characteristics of Multicast Trees
Xiaowei Yang and Li-wei Lehman, Dec. 1998.
A new algorithm that infers the characteristics of a multicast tree using only end-to-end measurements.