research

In The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System, Rosenblum and Ousterhout write:

[File] system design is governed by two general forces: technology, which provides a set of basic building blocks, and workload, which determines a set of operations that must be carried out efficiently.

I posit that a third force is the threat model that the system must withstand. I have researched computer systems over a two-decade-long period during which all three systems-shaping forces have seen tremendous change:

storage capacity has improved by 10,000x, CPU speeds by 1,000x, core counts by 50x, network speeds by 10,000x, and I/O latency by 1,000x;
new application workloads have emerged, including high-def video streaming, warehouse-scale computing, ML, and exabyte-scale data processing; and,
we contend with nation-state attackers, the deliberate sabotage of cryptographic designs, and the Internet as a global attack vector.

My research explores the opportunities created by these changes.

publications

Jupiter Evolving: Transforming Google’s Datacenter Network via Optical Circuit Switches and Software-Defined Networking, by Leon Poutievski, Omid Mashayekhi, Joon Ong, Arjun Singh, Mukarram Tariq, Rui Wang, Jianan Zhang, Virginia Beauregard, Patrick Conner, Steve Gribble, Rishi Kapoor, Stephen Kratzer, Nanfang Li, Hong Liu, Karthik Nagaraj, Jason Ornstein, Samir Sawhney, Ryohei Urata, Lorenzo Vicisano, Kevin Yasumura, Shidong Zhang, Junlan Zhou, and Amin Vahdat. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2022, August 2022.

Orion: Google’s Software-Defined Networking Control Plane, by Andrew Ferguson, Steve Gribble, Chi-Yao Hong, Charles Killian, Waqar Mohsin, Henrik Muehe, Joon Ong, Leon Poutievski, Arjun Singh, Lorenzo Vicisano, Richard Alimi, Shawn Shuoshuo Chen, Mike Conley, Subhasree Mandal, Karthik Nagaraj, Kondapa Naidu Bollineni, Amr Sabaa, Shidong Zhang, Min Zhu, and Amin Vahdat. Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘21), April 2021.

Snap: a Microkernel Approach to Host Networking, by Michael Marty, Marc de Kruijf, Jacob Adriaens, Christopher Alfeld, Sean Bauer, Carlo Contavalli, Michael Dalton, Nandita Dukkipati, William C. Evans, Steve Gribble, Nicholas Kidd, Roman Kononov, Gautam Kumar, Carl Mauer, Emily Musick, Lena Olson, Erik Rubow, Michael Ryan, Kevin Springborn, Paul Turner, Valas Valancius, Xi Wang, and Amin Vahdat. Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ‘19), October 2019, New York, NY.

PicNIC: Predictable Virtualized NIC, by Praveen Kumar, Nandita Dukkipati, Nathan Lewis, Yi Cui, Yaogong Wang, Chonggang Li, Valas Valancius, Jake Adriaens, Steve Gribble, Nate Foster, and Amin Vahdat. Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM ‘19), August 2019, New York, NY. (Awarded the best student paper.)

DDOS: Taming Nondeterminism in Distributed Systems, by Nicholas Hunt, Tom Bergan, Luis Ceze, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2013), Houston, Texas, March 2013.

Maverick: Providing Web Applications with Safe and Flexible Access to Local Devices, by David W. Richardson and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on Web Application Development (WebApps ‘11), Portland, Oregon, June 2011.

Operating Systems Implications of Fast, Cheap, Non-Volatile Memory, by Katelin Bailey, Luis Ceze, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XIII), Napa Valley, CA, May 2011.

Keypad: An Auditing File System for Theft-Prone Devices, by Roxana Geambasu, John P. John, Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of EuroSys 2011, Salzburg, Austria, April 2011. (Awarded the best student paper.)

Deterministic Process Groups in dOS, by Tom Bergan, Nicholas Hunt, Luis Ceze, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘10), Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 2010.

The Limits of Automatic OS Fingerprint Generation, by David W. Richardson, Steven D. Gribble, and Tadayoshi Kohno. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (aisec-2010), Chicago, IL, October 2010.

The Architecture and Implementation of an Extensible Web Crawler, by Jonathan M. Hsieh, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘10), San Jose, California, April 2010.

CloudViews: Communal Data Sharing in Public Clouds, by Roxana Geambasu, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), San Diego, CA, June 2009.

Studying Spamming Botnets Using Botlab, by John P. John, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘09), Boston, MA, April 2009.

Isolating Web Programs in Modern Browser Architectures, by Charles Reis and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 4th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2009), Nuremberg, Germany, March 2009.

Defeating Encrypted and Deniable File Systems: TrueCrypt v5.1a and the Case of the Tattling OS and Applications, by Alexei Czeskis, David J. St. Hilaire, Karl Koscher, Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Bruce Schneier. Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec ‘08), San Jose, CA, July 2008.

Flashproxy: Transparently Enabling Rich Web Content via Remote Execution, by Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2008), Breckenridge, Colorado, June 2008. (Awarded an honorable mention for best paper.)

Detecting In-Flight Page Changes with Web Tripwires, by Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Nicholas C. Weaver. Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ’08), San Francisco, CA, April 2008.

Organizing and Sharing Personal Web-Service Data, by Roxana Geambasu, Cherie Cheung, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2008), Beijing, China, April 2008.

Using Processes to Improve the Reliability of Browser-based Applications, by Charles Reis, Brian Bershad, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. University of Washington Technical Report 07-12-01, December 2007.

Architectural Principles for Safe Web Programs, by Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2007), Atlanta, Georgia, November 2007.

The Organization and Sharing of Web-Service Objects with Menagerie, by Roxana Geambasu, Cherie Cheung, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. University of Washington Technical Report 07-10-01, October 2007.

SpyProxy: Execution-based Detection of Malicious Web Content, by Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Damien Deville, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2007), Boston, MA, August 2007.

HomeViews: Peer-to-Peer Middleware for Personal Data Sharing Applications, by Roxana Geambasu, Magdalena Balazinska, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 2007 SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2007), Beijing, China, June 2007.

Why We Search: Visualizing and Predicting User Behavior, by Eytan Adar, Daniel Weld, Brian Bershad, and Steven Gribble. Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2007), Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 2007.

The Importance of History in a Media Delivery System, by Richard Dunn, Henry Levy, Steven Gribble, and John Zahorjan. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2007), Bellevue, WA, February 2007.

Cutting through the Confusion: A Measurement Study of Homograph Attacks, by Tobias Holgers, David E. Watson, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ‘06), Boston, MA, May 2006.

A Safety-Oriented Platform for Web Applications, by Richard S. Cox, Jacob Gorm Hansen, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2006. (Recommended for forwarding to IEEE TDSC.)

A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web, by Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2006), San Diego, CA, February 2006.

The Limits of Global Scanning Worm Detectors in the Presence of Background Noise, by David W. Richardson, Steven D. Gribble, and Edward D. Lazowska. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Rapid Malcode (WORM 2005), Fairfax, VA, November 2005.

Presence-Based Availability and P2P Systems, by Richard J. Dunn, John Zahorjan, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, Konstanz, Germany, August/September 2005.

Rethinking the Design of Virtual Machine Monitors, by Andrew Whitaker, Richard S. Cox, Marianne Shaw, and Steven D. Gribble. IEEE Computer, Volume 38, number 5, pages 57-62, May 2005.

Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hop Source Routing, by Krishna P. Gummadi, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Steven D. Gribble, Henry M. Levy, and David Wetherall. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘04), San Francisco, CA, December 2004.

Configuration Debugging as Search: Finding the Needle in the Haystack, by Andrew Whitaker, Richard S. Cox, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘04), San Francisco, CA, December 2004.

System support for pervasive applications, by Robert Grimm, Janet Davis, Eric Lemar, Adam MacBeth, Steven Swanson, Thomas Anderson, Brian Bershad, Gaetano Borriello, Steven Gribble, and David Wetherall. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 22(4):421-486, November 2004.

Using Time Travel to Diagnose Computer Problems, by Andrew Whitaker, Richard S. Cox, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, Leuven, Belgium, September 2004.

Constructing Services with Interposable Virtual Hardware, by Andrew Whitaker, Richard S. Cox, Marianne Shaw, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the First Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘04), San Francisco, California, March 2004.

Measurement and Analysis of Spyware in a University Environment, by Stefan Saroiu, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the First Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ‘04), San Francisco, California, March 2004.

Dealing with Cheaters in Anonymous Peer-to-Peer Networks, by Paul Gauthier, Brian Bershad, and Steven D. Gribble. University of Washington Technical Report 04-01-03, January 15, 2004.

Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Workload, by Krishna P. Gummadi, Richard J. Dunn, Stefan Saroiu, Steven D. Gribble, Henry M. Levy, and John Zahorjan. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-19), Bolton Landing, New York, October 2003. (slides)

The Impact of DHT Routing Geometry on Resilience and Proximity, by Krishna P. Gummadi, Ramakrishna Gummadi, Steven D. Gribble, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2003, Karlsruhe, Germany, August 2003.

Mangrove: Enticing Ordinary People onto the Semantic Web via Instant Gratification, by Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Alon Halevy, Henry Levy, Steven D. Gribble, William Pentney, Deepak Verma, and Stani Vlasseva. Proceedings of the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC ‘03), Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, October 2003.

Improving Server Software Support for Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors, by Luke K. McDowell, Susan J. Eggers, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP ‘03), San Diego, CA, June 2003.

Measuring and analyzing the characteristics of Napster and Gnutella hosts, by Stefan Saroiu, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Steven D. Gribble. Multimedia Systems, volume 9, number 2, 170-184 (2003), Springer-Verlag.

Scale and Performance in the Denali Isolation Kernel, by Andrew Whitaker, Marianne Shaw, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA, December 2002.

An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems, by Stefan Saroiu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Richard J. Dunn, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy. Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA, December 2002. (Awarded the best student paper.)

King: Estimating Latency between Arbitrary Internet End Hosts, by Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan Saroiu, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of SIGCOMM IMW 2002, Marseille, France, November 2002. (Awarded the best student paper.)

Denali: A Scalable Isolation Kernel, by Andrew Whitaker, Marianne Shaw, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, Saint-Emilion, France, September 2002.

Ninja: A Framework for Network Services, by Eric Brewer, Nikita Borisov, Mike Chen, Rob von Behren, Matt Welsh, David Culler, Josh MacDonald, Jeremy Lau, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 2002 Usenix Technical Conference, June 2002, Monterey, CA, USA.

Dynamically Fault-Tolerant Content Addressable Networks, by Jared Saia, Amos Fiat, Steve Gribble, Anna Karlin, and Stefan Saroiu. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ‘02), March 2002, Cambridge, MA USA.

Exploring the Design Space of Distributed and Peer-to-Peer Systems: Comparing the Web, TRIAD, and Chord/CFS, by Stefan Saroiu, P. Krishna Gummadi, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ‘02), March 2002, Cambridge, MA USA.

A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems, by Stefan Saroiu, P. Krishna Gummadi, and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of Multimedia Computing and Networking 2002 (MMCN'02), San Jose, CA, January 2002. (Awarded the best paper.)

What Can Peer-to-Peer Do for Databases, and Vice Versa?, by Steven Gribble, Alon Halevy, Zachary Ives, Maya Rodrig, and Dan Suciu. Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB ‘2001).

Systems Directions for Pervasive Computing, by Robert Grimm, Janet Davis, Ben Hendrickson, Eric Lemar, Adam MacBeth, Steven Swanson, Tom Anderson, Brian Bershad, Gaetano Borriello, Steven Gribble, and David Wetherall. Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VIII).

System-Level Programming Abstractions for Ubiquitous Computing, by Robert Grimm, Janet Davis, Eric Lemar, Adam MacBeth, Steven Swanson, Steven Gribble, Tom Anderson, Brian Bershad, Gaetano Borriello, and David Wetherall. Proceedings of the Workshop on Application Models and Programming Tools for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiTools ‘01).

Robustness in Complex Systems, by Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VIII).

Scalable, Distributed Data Structures for Internet Service Construction, by Steven D. Gribble, Eric A. Brewer, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and David Culler. Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2000).

The Ninja Architecture for Robust Internet-Scale Systems and Services, by Steven D. Gribble, Matt Welsh, Rob von Behren, Eric A. Brewer, David Culler, N. Borisov, S. Czerwinski, R. Gummadi, J. Hill, A. Joseph, R.H. Katz, Z.M. Mao, S. Ross, and B. Zhao. Journal of Computer Networks, Volume 35, Issue 4, March 2001. (Awarded the best paper out of all 2001 Computer Networks journal papers.)

A Design Framework for Highly Concurrent Systems, by Matt Welsh, Steven D. Gribble, Eric A. Brewer, and David Culler. UC Berkeley CS Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-00-1108.

Simplifying Cluster-Based Internet Service Construction with Scalable Distributed Data Structures, by Steven D. Gribble. UC Berkeley PhD Candidacy Qualifying Exam, April 19th, 1999.

The Ninja Jukebox, by Ian Goldberg, Steven D. Gribble, David Wagner, and Eric A. Brewer. Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Boulder, CO, October 1999.

The MultiSpace: an Evolutionary Platform for Infrastructural Services, by Steven D. Gribble, Matt Welsh, Eric A. Brewer, and David Culler. Proceedings of the 1999 Usenix Annual Technical Conference.

A Network Architecture for Heterogeneous Mobile Computing, by Eric A. Brewer, Randy H. Katz, Elan Amir, Hari Balakrishnan, Yatin Chawathe, Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Todd Hodes, Giao Nguyen, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Mark Stemm, Srinivasan Seshan, and Tom Henderson. IEEE Personal Communications, 5(5), October 1998, pages 8-24.

Experience With Top Gun Wingman: A Proxy-Based Graphical Web Browser for the 3Com PalmPilot, by Armando Fox, Ian Goldberg, Steven D. Gribble, David C. Lee, Anthony Polito, and Eric A. Brewer. Proceedings of Middleware ‘98, Lake District, England, September 1998.

Self-Similarity in File Systems, by Steven D. Gribble, Gurmeet Singh Manku, Drew Roselli, Eric A. Brewer, Timothy J. Gibson, and Ethan L. Miller. Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS ‘98, Madison, Wisconsin, June 1998.

System Design Issues for Internet Middleware Services: Deductions from a Large Client Trace, by Steven D. Gribble and Eric A. Brewer. Proceedings of the 1997 Usenix Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Monterey, California, December 1997.

Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services, by Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Eric A. Brewer, and Paul Gauthier. Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-16), St. Malo, France, October 1997.

Orthogonal Extensions to the WWW User Interface Using Client-Side Technologies, by Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Anthony S. Polito, Andrew Huang, Benjamin Ling, and Eric A. Brewer. Demo at the 10th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ‘97), Banff, Canada, October 1997.

Adapting to Client Variability via On-Demand Dynamic Distillation, by Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Eric A. Brewer, and Elan Amir. Proceedings of the ACM Seventh International Conference on Architectural support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 1-5, 1996.

Security on the Move: Indirect Authentication using Kerberos, by Armando Fox and Steven D. Gribble. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ‘96) , Rye, New York, November 10-12, 1996.

The Bay Area Research Wireless Access Network (BARWAN), by Randy H. Katz, Eric A. Brewer, Elan Amir, Hari Balakrishnan, Armando Fox, Steve Gribble, Todd Hodes, Daniel Jiang, Giao Thanh Nguyen, Venkata Padmanabhan, and Mark Stemm. Proceedings of the Spring COMPCON Conference 1996, Santa Clara, CA, February 25-28, 1996.

Give and Take: Children Collaborating on One Computer, by Kori Inkpen, Kellogg S. Booth, Steven D. Gribble and Maria Klawe. Chi ‘95 Proceedings, Short Papers, Denver, CO, May 1995.

A Distributed Multimedia Architecture for Intent-Based Video Authoring and Presentation, by Steven D. Gribble, Andrew Csinger, and Kellogg S. Booth. Proceedings of the MultiComm ‘94 Conference, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 2-3, 1994.

A Design Framework and a Scalable Storage Platform to Simplify Internet Service Construction, by Steven D. Gribble. Ph.D. thesis, U.C. Berkeley, September 2000.

System Design Issues for Internet Middleware Services: Deductions from a Large Client Trace, by Steven D. Gribble. Master of Science thesis, U.C. Berkeley, December 1997.

Topological Entropy as a Practical Tool for the Identification and Characterization of Chaotic Systems, by Steven D. Gribble. Undergraduate senior physics thesis, UBC, May 1995.

Knowledge-Based Discourse in Educational Games, by Steven D. Gribble. Undergraduate senior computer science thesis, UBC, May 1995.