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Creators/Authors contains: "Katz-Bassett, Ethan"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 27, 2027
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 26, 2027
  3. Clouds provide latency-sensitive services to clients at geographically distributed sites. They need precise control of client-site mappings for performance and, if a site fails, fast failover to other sites without cascading failures due to failover-induced overload or risky routing reconfiguration. However, clouds today route clients to sites by anycast or unicast with DNS-based redirection--methods that compromise either control or availability. In fact, even beyond these existing techniques, we find that all general-purpose approaches for directing clients to sites face inevitable tradeoffs among control, availability, and routing stability. We then present new general-purpose routing techniques and demonstrate via Internet-scale experiments that they provide much better tradeoffs among these three goals than existing techniques. One of our techniques achieves anycast's advantages with much better control, and another speeds up unicast's failover while preserving its advantages. Our techniques establish a new Pareto frontier for cloud routing. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 24, 2026
  4. Given the increasing residential Internet use, a thorough understanding of what services are used and how they are delivered to residential networks is crucial. However, access to residential traces is limited due to their proprietary nature. Most prior work used campus datasets from academic buildings and undergraduate dorms, and the few studies with residential traces are often outdated or use data unavailable to other researchers. We provide access to a new residential dataset-we have been collecting traffic from ~1000 off-campus residences that house faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and their families. Although our residents are university affiliates, our dataset captures their activity at home, and we show that this dataset offers a distinct perspective from the campus and dorm traffic. We investigate the serving infrastructures and services accessed by the residences, revealing several interesting findings: peer-to-peer activity is notable, comprising 47% of the total flow duration; third-party CDNs host many services but serve much less traffic (e.g., Cloudflare hosts 19% of domains but only 2% of traffic); and 11 of the top 100 services that have nearby servers often serve users from at least 1,000km farther away. This broad analysis, as well as our data sharing, pushes toward a more thorough understanding of Internet service usage and delivery, motivating and supporting future research. 
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  5. The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) has fueled speculation that cybercriminals may utilize LLMs to improve and automate their attacks. However, so far, the security community has had only anecdotal evidence of attackers using LLMs, lacking large-scale data on the extent of real-world malicious LLM usage. In this joint work between academic researchers and Barracuda Networks, we present the first large-scale study measuring AI-generated attacks in-the-wild. In particular, we focus on the use of LLMs by attackers to craft the text of malicious emails by analyzing a corpus of hundreds of thousands of real-world malicious emails detected by Barracuda. The key challenge in this analysis is determining ground truth: we cannot know for certain whether an email is LLM or human-generated. To overcome this challenge, we observe that, prior to the launch of ChatGPT, email text was almost certainly not LLM-generated. Armed with this insight, we run three state-of-the-art LLM detection methods on our corpus and calibrate them against pre-ChatGPT emails, as well as against a diverse set of LLM-generated emails we create ourselves. Since the launch of ChatGPT, all three detection methods indicate that attackers have steadily increased their use of LLMs to generate emails, especially for spam. Using our most precise AI-detection method, we conservatively estimate that at least ~51% of spam emails and ~14% of business email compromise attacks in our dataset are generated using LLMs, as of April 2025. Finally, analyzing the text of LLM-generated emails, we find evidence that attackers use LLMs to ''polish'' their emails and to generate multiple versions of the same email message. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 15, 2026
  6. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) offers several knobs to control routing decisions, but they are coarse-grained and only affect routes received from neighboring Autonomous Systems (AS). To enhance policy expressiveness, BGP was extended with thecommunitiesattribute, allowing an AS to attach metadata to routes and influence the routing decisions of a remote AS. The metadata can carryinformationto (e.g., where a route was received) or request anactionfrom a remote AS (e.g., not to export a route to one of its neighbors). Unfortunately, the semantics of BGP communities are not standardized, lack universal rules, and are poorly documented. In this work, we design and evaluate algorithms to automatically uncover BGPaction communitiesand ASes that violate standard practices by consistently using theinformation communitiesof other ASes, revealing undocumented relationships between them (e.g., siblings). Our experimental evaluation with billions of route announcements from public BGP route collectors from 2018 to 2023 uncovers previously unknown AS relationships and shows that our algorithm for identifying action communities achieves average precision and recall of 92.5% and 86.5%, respectively. 
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