October 17— Another press burst for Earlence Fernandes and collaborators, this time for work showing how malicious prompts can be used to exfiltrate user information. Read the Wired story or visit the paper website to learn more.

August 14— Wide coverage this week of MakeShift, the WOOT paper by Earlence Fernandes and his co-authors that demonstrates remote wireless takeover of Shimano bicycle shifters. This includes a feature by Andy Greenberg at Wired and an TV interview of Earlence at KBPS. Congrats Earlence!

August 6— Another congrats is in order for Nadia Heninger and faculty alumn Hovav Shacham whose 2009 CRYPTO paper "Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits" has won this year's IACR Test-of-Time award. This is the paper that showed how to recover RSA private keys using a modest random subset of its bits.

July 9— Congrats to Nadia Heninger, students Miro Haller and Adam Suhl and their collaborators for their discovery of the Blast-RADIUS vulnerability in the RADIUS authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) protocol. The associated paper will appear at USENIX Security and involves a chosen-prefix MD5 attack allowing attackers to synthesize Access-Accept messages without any knowledge of the underlying secret key. RADIUS is widely deployed in network equipment in ISPs, enterprises and in a variety of industrial settings and there has been significant work behind the scenes to provide fixed and/or mitigated updates to many thousands of systems before this work was made public. An amazing bit of work all around!

January 31— Congrats to Stefan Savage, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (and Geoff Voelker, the application form only allowed two names) and their students for receiving one of the first Google "Trust and Safety" Research Awards for their work focused on using Large Language Models in scam honeypots. And we hear they wrote the proposal without any help from AI!

December 9— As the year draws to a close, we'd like to reflect and recognize all the success this year: six best paper awards (almost a quarter of our papers won awards this year), four completed dissertations, a new faculty member (welcome Deepak!), an NSF Career award and a $9.5M ARPA-H grant -- not too bad for a year. Congrats everyone!

October 2— The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced a $9.5 dollar award to UC San Diego to develop new ways to mitigate ransomware attacks on hospitals. This effort, led by Christian Dameff and Jeff Tully, is joint between UCSD Health and the UCSD School of Engineering (notably our own Aaron Schulman, Geoff Voelker, and Stefan Savage) and is just the latest to come out of a long standing collaboration in this space. Congrats everyone!

August 29— Congrats to our own Aaron Schulman for his recent NSF CAREER grant and for his promotion to tenured associate professor. Congrats!

August 22— Congrats (again) to Keegan Ryan and Nadia Heninger for their Best Paper award at the 2023 Crypto for Fast Practical Lattice Reduction through Iterated Compression!!

July 24— Congratulations to Nishant Bhaskar for defending his dissertation, "An Empirical Approach to Securing Wireless Access Links in Urban Areas". Nishant's unique research had him driving across Souther California and brought him in touch with both industry and government (special thanks to the folks from USSS who attended the defense). He'll next be doing crazy wireless things at MQ Prime. Congrats Nishant!

July 4— Congratulations to Enze "Alex" Liu (and co-authors) for winning the Best Paper award at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) for their work on insecurities in e-mail forwarding frameworks and implimentations. UCSD put out a nice summary of the work here.

June 5— Welcome to Deepak Kumar who will join us as an Assisstant Professor starting in July 2024! Deepak got his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, has been hunkering down as a Postdoc at Stanford during the pandemic, and is doing fascinating work around online abuse and safety. We are all looking forward to working with him next year!

May 26— Congratulations to Grant Ho for his appointment as Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Grant was part of the inaugural class of the CSE Fellows postdoctoral program and was a joy to work with these last few years. Congrats and best of luck!

May 18— Congratulations to Audrey Randall who defended her dissertation today, "Names to Conjure With: Measuring and Combating Online Adversaries by Studying Their Use of Naming System". As one of many firsts during her time with us, Audrey premiered as post-defense music video reflecting on her time at UCSD. Audrey will bring her talents to Google and we wish her the best. Congrats!

May 22— And finally Congrats to Hosein Yavarzadeh (and co-authors) for the third IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award of the season for their work on Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution!

May 22— Congrats to Evan Johnson (and co-authors) for winning the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award for WaVe: a verificable secure WebAssembly sandboxing runtime further shrinking the trusted computing base for Wasm!

May 22— Congrats to Miro Haller (and co-authors) for their paper, MEGA: Malleable Encrypto Goes Awry which received the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award!

May 8— Keegan Ryan and Nadia Heninger receive the best paper award at the International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptoigraphy (PKC) for The Hidden Number Problem with Small Unknown Multipliers: Cryptanalyzing MEGA in Six Queries and Other Applications. Congrats!

April 21— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian who gave a spirited defense of her dissertation, "Prioritizing Security Practices via Large-Scale Measurement of User Behavior". This was quite an event, filling room 1242 and with well-wishers from four different universities and a gaggle of companies online for the festivities. Ariana will be joining Censys in the Fall and we are looking forward to seeing what she does next. Congrats!

April 11— Congratulations to Katherine Izhikevich for receiving the 2023 Stephen L. Squires SWSIS Scholarship administered by Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA) and the CRA. Congrats!

February 7— Congratulations to Stefan Savage for his election to the National Academy of Engineering!

December 1— Congratulations to Audrey Randall (and her co-authors) for winning the Best Student Paper award at the 2022 APWG eCrime Symposium for her work examining the issues around malware use of blockchain naming systems.

October 31— Congrats to Daniele Micciancio whose paper "Generalized Compact Knapsacks, Cyclic Lattices, and Efficient One-Way Functions from Worst-Case Complexity Assumptions" has won the 2022 FOCS Test of Time Award!

September 14— Yet more celebration! Congrats to Deian Stefan for his 2012 paper "Addressing Covert Termination and Timing Channels in Concurrent Information Flow Systems", which has received the ICFP "Most Influential Paper" award (aka Test of Time award). Congrats Deian!

August 19— Today we celebrate Shravan Narayan's successful defense of his thesis, "Retrofitting Sandboxing in Real Systems", elements of which are now in wide-spread use. Shravan will soon be starting in his new role as a faculty member at UT Austin. Congrats Shravan!

August 10— Congrats to Nadia Heninger for winning the USENIX Security Test-of-Time Award for her 2012 paper: Mining Your P's and Q's: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices, which also won the best paper award the year it was published! Clearly there was something special in the San Diego water a decade ago, as this is the third "test of time" award for members of the security group this year, and the sixth in the last four years.

July 12— Welcome to Earlence Fernandes who is joining us at UCSD! Earlence got his Ph.D. at UMich and has spent the last few years as an Assisstant Professor at the University of Wisconsin. We are looking forward to working with him!

July 8— Congrats to Sam Crow who successfully defended his thesis today, "Security Testing Tools for Complex Cyber-Physical Systems". No doubt the only Ph.D. we've seen that involved significant chunks of a 737 in their home. Sam's next projects will have him working with Meta. Congrats!

June 1— Congrats to Gautam Akiwate who successfully defended his thesis today, "Identifying DNS Infrastructure Hijacks using Large Scale Measurements". Gautam will be starting a Postdoc with Zakir Durumeric at Stanford. Gautam has been a force for good in the department for longer than he will admit -- supporting Chez Bob, the holiday parties, sysnet outings, etc -- and we will all miss him.

May 23— Eleven years ago, UCSD alumns Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, He Liu, and Damon McCoy, along with UCSD faculty Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their colleagues from Berkeley and Budapest, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, published a comprehensive analysis of the spam criminal value chain. Today that paper, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain and its impact was celebrated with the Test-of-Time award, presented at the 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy conference. Congrats all!

March 18— Congrats to Mihir Bellare for again receiving the IACR Test of Time award (he also won it last year), this time for his Crypto 2007 paper "Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption", published jointly with then UCSD Ph.D. student Alexandra Bodyreva (now faculty at GA Tech) and then UCSD undergrad Adam O'Neil (now faculty at UMass Amherst).

February 15— Another congrats to Deian Stefan. This time for receiving a Sloan Fellowship!

February 8— Congrats to Deian Stefan for being on the initial members and recipients of funding from Intel Labs' new Resilient Archiotectures and Robust Electronics (RARE) Center!

January 25— More recognition for Shravan Narayan, Craig Disselkoen and their co-authors as the RLBox paper receives honorable mention in the 2021 NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper competition. Congrats all!

January 24— More great news – Stefan Savage received a Diamond Award from the University of Washington School of Engineering, an award which honors outstanding alumni who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering. Stefan received the Distinguished Achievement in Academia award for his signature style of work that "challenges traditional investigation methods and redefines academic approaches to network security, privacy and reliability". Congratulations Stefan!

January 10— Congratulations to Gautam Akiwate (and his co-authors) for being named as a winner of the Internet Research Task Force's Applied Networking Research Prize for his work characterizing a domain hijacking risk that is an accidental byproduct of undocumented operational practices between domain registrars and registries. Gautam's award marks the second year in a row that the group has received the prize (Audrey Randall received it last year). Let's keep the streak going!

December 11— Its been a long road, but after 14yrs, a bunch of jobs, founding and building up AttackIQ, the pandemic gave prodigal member Stephan Chenette the pause to finish his Masters with his master's thesis, "An Analysis Of Judgment Variability Amongst Cybersecurity Participants When Asked To Forecast Cybersecurity-related Events". A nice bit of work and proof that you can go home again. Congrats Stephan!

September 22— The Fast and the Curious: Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Daniel Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and the late Brian Kantor, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franzi Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno! Their landmark work on security vulnerabilities in modern automobiles was just awarded a 2021 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award honors research for which the results were unforeseen at the outset, but which ultimately led to major breakthroughs that have had significant societal impact. As Charlize Theron famously quipped, "Hack them all". Indeed, Charlize. Indeed.

June 2— The awards keep on rolling in! Today it was announced that Stefan Savage has received the 2021 Academic Senate Distinguished Research Award, which is awarded "for the ground-breaking research conducted by members of the UCSD faculty". This particular award comes with work, however: Stefan has to give a university-wide lecture on his research. Congratulations Stefan, and we all look forward to your lecture!

May 20— Congratulations to Sunjay Cauligi, Craig Disselkoen, Klaus von Gleissenthall, Dean Tullsen, and Deian Stefan, and their collaborators Tamara Rezk and Gilles Barthe, for making it as finalists in the inaugural Intel Hardware Security Academic Award for their PLDI 2020 paper on speculatively constant-time foundations.

April 22— Congratulations to Stefan Savage for being elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences! The Academy celebrates excellence across every field of human endeavor "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." Being elected to the Academy is a tremendous honor and outstanding achievement. Way to go, Stefan!

March 25— Congrats to Mihir Bellare for receiving the 2021 IACR Test of Time award for his 2006 Crypto paper, "New proofs for NMAC and HMAC: Security without collision-resistance".

January 5— Congratulations to Audrey Randall (and her co-authors) for being named as a winner of the Internet Research Task Force's Applied Networking Research Prize for her work on the Trufflehunter DNS inference system.

December 18— Congratulations to Marco Vassena, Craig Disselkoen, Klaus von Gleissenthall, Sunjay Cauligi, Rami Gökhan Kıcı, Ranjit Jhala, Dean Tullsen, and Deian Stefan, for receiving a distinguished paper award at the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages for their work on eliminating spectulative leaks in cryptographic code.

November 7— Congratulations to Shravan Narayan for winning first place in the Applied Reserach competition at CSAW'20 for his work on the RLBox library sandboxing framework.

August 24— They did it again! Nadia Polikarpova and Deian Stefan, and their collaborators Jean Yang, Shachar Itzhaky, Travis Hance, and Armando Solar-Lezama received a distinguished paper award at the 2020 International Conference on Functional Programming for their work on using liquid types for security.

August 12— Congratulations to Shravan Narayan, Craig Disselkoen, Sorin Lerner, Hovav Shacham, and Deian Stefan, and their Stanford and Mozilla collaborators Tal Garfinkel, Nathan Froyd, and Eric Rahm for receiving a distinguished paper award at the 2020 USENIX Security Symposium. Read more about their effort sandboxing third-party libraries in the production Firefox browser.

July 2— CSE Alumn David Kohlbrenner, who completed his Ph.D. in 2018, will be joining the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering this fall as an Assistant Professor. Congrats David, please say hi for us to all the other UCSD North folks!

June 10— Congrats to Guo "Vector" Li, who defended his dissertation today on "An Empirical Analysis on Threat Intelligence: Data Characteristic and Real-World Uses". Vector will be joining Google to work on cloud security with our old collaborator, Chris Grier.

May 18— Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Danny Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and the late Brian Kantor, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franzi Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno! Their landmark study of the vulnerability of modern automobiles was awarded the 2020 IEEE Security & Privacy Test of Time Award. Read more about their efforts around their seminal work.

March 12— Congratulations to Nadia Heninger and her collaborators for setting a new factoring record by being the first to factor the RSA-250 prime in the RSA factoring challenge.

December 16— Congrats to Ariana Mirian who was named the campuswide student recipient of the UC San Diego Inclusive Excellence Award. The award recognizes those faculty, staff, students, departments and organizations who have made outstanding contributions in support of UC San Diego's commitment to inclusive excellence and diversity.

November 21— It is with great sadness that we learned today that Brian Kantor has passed away. Brian worked in the systems and networking group for the last decade before his retirement in 2018. You'll see his name on the automotive and voting security papers we published and the reality is that much of the work we did benefited from his ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat when we needed one. But CSE was only a small part of his time here at UCSD. Brian was truly an institution and had been at UCSD for 47 years. He was the University postmaster, he ran the name servers and he helped run network infrastructure. For those old enough to remember rlogin — he wrote the protocol. Ditto for the NNTP protocol that Netnews was based on. He was a nationally known ham radio operator and also co-founded and managed AMPRnet (the amateur radio packet network) which also became a critical research resource both here in CSE and at CAIDA. Brian was a unique personality and didn't naturally fit within bureaucracies, but he was eager to teach to those who wanted to learn, had a sharp wit and was an implacable advocate for doing the right thing. We were lucky to have had the time we had with him.

November 13— A while back, CSE alumni Tom Ristenpart, Hovav Shacham and Stefan Savage (and co-author Eran Tromer) published one of the first cloud security papers called "Hey You Get Off Of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third Party Clouds". Ten years and a couple thousand citations later, the paper has been named this year's winner of the ACM CCS Test of Time Award. The award recognizes papers from CCS ten years prior that have had the greatest impact on security research and practice over the past decade. Congrats to Tom, Hovav and Stefan! (and a particular congrats to Hovav who has now won TWO of these awards!)

September 5— Congrats to Zhaomo Yang, who defended his dissertation today on "Compilers and Software Security: Opportunities and Challenges". He will be joining Google shortly.

August 18— Today, at Crypto 2019, Nadia Heninger was named the recipient of the CRA-W's Borg Early Career Award! Congrats Nadia!

August 14— Kudos to Nishant Bhaskar, Maxwell Bland, Kirill Levchenko, and Aaron Schulman for their work on detecting card skimmers in retail gas pumps. Their app, Bluetana, is now in use by multiple law enforcement and regulatory agencies across four states and has been used to discovery dozens of card skimmers. You can read more in the press: Krebs on Security, KBPS, Gizmodo, Techcrunch or in the original paper at USENIX Security.

August 14— Congrats to Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their Berkeley colleagues (notably Ph.D. student Grant Ho who, was the sole student on this effort) for winning the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security for their paper, Detecting and Characterizing Lateral Phishing at Scale.

June 14— Alex Gamero-Garrido has been awarded a Microsoft Dissertation Grant to support his work identifying nations whose Internet connectivity is particularly vulnerable to censorship, inspection, or disruption by foreign countries. Congratulations Alex!

June 7— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian for receiving the 2019 CSE Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service/Leadership, together with Ailie Fraser. Thank you for your dedication, Ariana!

May 24— Congratulations to Louis Dekoven and Brown Farinholt for defending their respective dissertations today. This double header started with Brown's "Understanding the Remote Access Trojan malware ecosystem through the lens of the infamous DarkComet RAT", broke for lunch, and then concluded with Louis, "Addressing Device Compromise from the Perspective of Large Organizations". This is not their last party together however, as both are eventually headed to a new group at Facebook's DC office.

December 17— The year ends on a high note with the fantastic news that Alex Snoeren has been named an ACM Fellow for his "his innovative approaches to measuring, managing and directing network traffic". He will henceforth be known as Packet Whisperer.

July 27— Congratulations to Joe DeBlasio, who successfully defended his dissertation today on "Countering Financially-Motivated Malicious Actors on the Internet"! At the end of summer Joe will join the ever-growing UCSD contingent at Google.

May 17— Congrats to David Kohlbrenner fo successfully defending his thesis, "Trusted Systems for Uncertain Times" today. David will spend the next couple years refining his puns at UC Berkeley as part of his postdoc with Dawn Song.

March 26— In the news! Danny Huang's paper at Financial Cryptography and Data Security on the profitability of alternative cryptocurrencies highlighted by JSOE: "On cryptocurrency exchanges, it's better to be a miner than a speculator, study finds".

December 15— In the news! Joe DeBlasio's Tripwire paper that he presented at IMC on remotely detecting compromised sites has been highlighted by many tech sites, including Silicon Republic, Tech Explorist, Computing, Bleeping Computer, and even the department. Congrats, Joe!

December 14— Today Geoff Voelker was named an ACM Fellow for his "contributions to empirical measurement and analysis in systems, networking in security" which basically is a fancy way of saying that he is really good at figuring stuff out instead of just BSing.

October 10— Today Stefan became a MacArthur Fellow! One of "24 Extraordinarily Creative People Who Inspire Us All", the MacArthur Foundation recognized Stefan for "identifying and addressing the technological, economic, and social vulnerabilities underlying internet security challenges and cybercrime." Clearly, there is only one word to sum it all up: Genius!

August 31— Good things come in pairs: Danny Huang successfully defended his dissertation today on "Using crypto-currencies to track cyber-attacks, speculative investors, and human traffickers". Congratulations, Danny! Continuing his adventures in security and privacy, Danny will be moving to Princeton as a postdoc working with Nick Feamster.

August 16— David Moore, Geoff Voelker, and Stefan Savage have won the 2017 USENIX Security Test-of-Time Award for their 2001 paper, “Inferring Internet Denial-of-Service Activity.“

July 20— At IETF 99, Ph.D. alum Steve Checkoway presented “A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident,” a winner of the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize. Steve’s coauthors on the paper, which was published at ACM CCS 2016, include several with a UCSD connection: B.S./M.S. alum Jake Maskiewicz, former postdoc Nadia Heninger, and professor Hovav Shacham.

November 12— This week, David Kohlbrenner traveled to Brooklyn to present his USENIX 2016 paper, “Trusted Browsers for Uncertain Times”, one of ten finalists in the 2016 2016 NYU-Poly CSAW Applied Research Competition. Today the judges announced that David’s paper took second place, winning a $750 prize. Congratulations!

September 25— UCSD B.S./M.S. alum Jake Maskiewicz, Ph.D. alum Steve Checkoway, and former postdoc Nadia Heninger won a Best Paper award at ACM CCS 2016 for their paper “A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident”! Jake presented the paper. Congratulations to Jake, Steve, Nadia, and their coauthors!

September 15— Congratulations to Wilson Lian who defended his dissertation today, titled "JIT Spraying Threats on ARM and Defense by Diversification" (and coming soon to an NDSS near you)!

July 20— Kashmir Hill wrote an article about Steven Hill and Zhimin Zhou’s PETS 2016 paper: “Um, bad news: Pixelating or blurring doesn’t actually work to hide text.“

June 15— But wait...there's more! June has become a "Win Everything" month for Stefan, who today was named to the Irwin Mark and Joan Klein Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science, succeeding Ron Graham who is retiring. Congratulations yet again, Stefan!

June 13— Congratulations to Karyn Benson who defended her dissertation today, entitled "Leveraging Internet Background Radiation for Opportunistic Network Analysis"! After putting the last finishing touches on the document itself, Karyn will be taking her many talents to Boston where she will join Akamai's technical staff, as well as continue her training for future Boston Marathons. Congrats, Karyn!

June 11— In back-to-back awards, today Stefan Savage accepted the 2015 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for "innovative research in network security, privacy, and reliability that has taught us to view attacks and attackers as elements of an integrated technological, societal, and economic system." Congratulations once again, Stefan! (Also congratulating Stefan at the awards ceremony was Amin, both of whom look quite distinguished in tuxedos.)

June 10— Today Stefan Savage was awarded the 2016 University of Washington CSE Alumni Achievement Award, together with Albert Greenberg. Stefan receives the award for his "outstanding research in network security and efforts to fight cyber crime...tackling everything from computer worms and online scams, to distributed attacks, insidious global consumer fraud networks, and automobile systems hacking." Congratulations, Stefan!

June 3— Today the winners of the second annual CSE Graduate and Undergraduate awards were announced, and we are thrilled that David Kohlbrenner was awarded the Graduate Award for Research. Congratulations!

December 7— Congratulations to Neha Chachra, who successfully defended her dissertation today on "Understanding URL Abuse for Profit." Neha caps a long, creative career contributing to the department in many roles, from the "Learn from Peers" graduate student program to heading the graduate student association's procurement committee. In true style, she gets bonus points for her gift to her advisors on the day of her defense. Neha joins Facebook in February to make online social networks a more secure place.

September 14— Matt Der successfully defended his thesis today on "Investigating Large-Scale Internet Abuse Through Web Page Classification." Matt heads back to his old stomping grounds in Virginia to join his brother's startup company, notch.io. Congratulations Matt!

August 11— It is a Corvette Summer for Ian Foster and Karl Koscher! Today at WOOT 2015 Ian presented his paper, "Fast and Vulnerable: A Story of Telematic Failures", detailing the security vulnerabilities of car insurance dongles, co-authored with Andrew Prudhomme, Karl, and Stefan. WIRED also covered their work in an article today, "Hackers Cut a Corvette's Brakes Via a Common Car Gadget", picturing Karl and Ian. Special thanks to Sid Karin for the use of his Corvette!

July 30— Congratulations to Tristan Halvorson, who successfully defended his thesis today on "Registration Intent in the Domain Name Market." Tristan also boards the Google train, but he's taking the northern express to the Seattle office!

June 5— Today the winners of the inaugural CSE Graduate and Undergraduate awards were announced, and we are thrilled that four students in the Sysnet group were recognized with awards: Neha Chachra was awarded the Graduate Award for Service and the Viceroy of Social Hour, Gautam Akiwate was awarded the Graduate Award for Teaching, Jake Maskiewicz was awarded the Undergraduate Award for Teaching, and Louis Dekoven was a runner up for the Viceroy of Social Hour. Congratulations everyone on all of your award-winning efforts!

June 2— Keaton Mowery successfully defended his thesis today titled "Beneath the Attack Surface." He'll be heading up north to join Apple, and we wish him the best of luck. Congratulations Keaton!

October 30— Continuing the trend, Qing Zhang successfully defended her dissertation today on "Utilizing Source Information to Detect and Prevent Online Fraud". In December, Qing also joins Google...although she will be bolstering the Southern California alumni contingent at Google Irvine. Congratulations and good luck, Qing!

October 16— The Fall series continue as Jiaqi Zhang successfully defended his dissertation today on "Software Configuration Learning and Recommendation". Jiaqi joins local San Diego startup Whova to work with the UCSD founders on applying technical networking to professional networking. Congratulations and good luck, Jiaqi!

September 30— Today David Wang became the next student in the Fall Dissertation Series, defending his dissertation on "A Comprehensive Approach to Undermining Search Result Poisoning". Soon David will join the ranks at Google Etsy, continuing his work dealing with Internet service abuse. Congratulations and good luck, David!

June 26— kc Claffy has been named one of the two recipients of the 2015 IEEE Internet Award. She and our close collaborator, UC Berkeley's Vern Paxson, where both cited for their "For seminal contributions to the field of Internet measurement, including security and network data analysis, and for distinguished leadership in and service to the Internet community by providing open-access data and tools." Congratulations kc and Vern!

April 28— Today Sarah Meiklejohn defended her thesis, "Flexible Models for Secure Systems". After much cryptography and bitcoin sleuthing, Sarah heads across the pond to start as an Assistant Professor at University College London in a joint appointment in the Departments of Computer Science and Security and Crime Science. (How cool is that?) Congratulations, Sarah!

March 31— In an article titled ‘Exclusive: NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought — study,’ Joseph Menn at Reuters reports on new research from a group that includes UCSD alums Steve Checkoway and Tom Ristenpart, current UCSD undergrad Jake Maskiewicz, and collaborators from Wisconsin, TU Eindhoven, Johns Hopkins, and UIC.

March 5— Alum Chris Kanich, now a professor at UIC, has won an NSF CAREER award. Congrats, Chris!

December 18— Alum Steve Checkoway’s paper showing that Mac laptop cameras can be reprogrammed to disable the camera-on LED is written up in the Washington Post.

December 10— Mihir Bellare and YY Zhou are named Fellows of the ACM. Congrats to both!

September 26— Network World covers Vacha Dave's work on Viceroi, a classifier that advertising networks can use to detect click fraud.

August 28— Sarah Meiklejohn’s recent IMC paper, “Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names” looks at some of the issues in tracking transactions in the Bitcoin payment network. It is now receiving a bunch of popular attention including on Slashdot, Vice, BusinessWeek, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Wired and others (undoubtedly driven in part by her involvement in this story in which she helped track down an attempt to frame Brian Krebs with heroin purchased on the underground site Silk Road). Most recently she used this technique track drug purchases made by reporters at Forbes. Congrats to Sarah and all her co-authors!

August 16— In recognition of his fantastic talk, Danny Huang received the Best Student Presentation award at the 2013 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking (HotSDN). Danny was in Hong Kong to present his paper, "High-Fidelity Switch Models for Software-Defined Network Emulation", co-authored with Ken and Alex. Great job, Danny!

July 11— Today represents the end of an era. Andreas Pitsillidis successfully defended his dissertation and will be escaping the gravity well of UCSD CSE. In addition to his own tremendous body of research, Andreas personally designed, created, maintained and updated the collection, storage and processing infrastructure used by most of our security measurement work. He leaves us today with a near-production scale system curating over 100TB of structured and unstructed security data — virtually all of our papers depend on his work and we thank him for it. Congrats Andreas, good luck at Google and we hope to keep working with you in the future!

May 22— Congratulations to Gjergji Zyba who defended his dissertation today on "Mobile Malware Propagation and Defense". After stints in Stockholm, Bath, and Paris, Gjergji is finishing his collaborative work with Ericsson as he explores his next steps in the Bay Area.

January 19— Today Brian Kantor officially becomes a sexagenarian — join us in wishing him a happy 60th birthday! (Coincidentally, it also nearly marks the 27th anniversary of Brian’s creating the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) in the mid 1980s.)

January 11— NPR’s Planet Money covers our Pharmaleaks paper with an interview on Morning Edition and a longer version in their bi-weekly podcast.

October 28— As "an expert at revealing", Stefan Savage talks about cybercime with the San Diego Union-Tribune.

September 25— $10 million.

August 21— Mihir Bellare was named a Fellow of the IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, for “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and for educational leadership in cryptography.”

August 8— Nadia Heninger’s paper, “Mining Your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices,” won the Best Paper award at USENIX Security 2012. Congratulations to Nadia and her coauthors!

August 7— Congrats to Feng Lu and Jiaqi Zhang whose HotSec paper on the risks of adversarial composition of Web services was just covered in Technology Review.

August 6— The research that keeps on giving… ComputerWorld covers the joint UW/UCSD work on automotive security.

June 7— Stefan Savage and Chris Grier lend their voices to a PCWorld article on the spamming ecosystem, and Stefan weighs in about malware victims in an MIT Technology Review article.

June 4— Chris Kanich defended his dissertation, "Characterizing Internet Scams through Underground Infrastructure Infiltration", mere days after Cynthia. Also bolstering the UCSD Midwest contingent, Chris will be moving to the windy city and starting as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in the fall. Congratulations, Chris! We will miss the drugs!

May 9— For the second year in a row, we have four papers accepted to the USENIX Security Symposium: two co-authored by our super-productive postdoc Nadia Heninger, one from our PL group and another by our usual large cast. Congrats to everyone!

February 16— Today, the CCC sponsored a symposium to recognize the 20th anniversary of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD) — the multi-agency funding program that has sponsored US computing research over the past two decades. The NITRD Symposium featured a broad range of technical speakers including Jeannette Wing, Kevin Knight, Beth Mynatt, Helen Nissenbaum, Sebastian Thrun, Shwetak Patel, Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Lange, Vint Cerf, Bill Scherlis, Russ Altman, David Keyes, Kathy Yelick, Tom Davis, Eric Brown, Eric Horvitz, Alex Szalay, Tom Kalil, Peter Lee, Chuck Vest and our own Stefan Savage. In 15 minutes apiece, each highlighted how transformative twenty years of computing research in their field has been on the real world.

February 1— In his ongoing cybercrime series, Brian Krebs hunts down the operators of major botnets. In today&squo;s column he focuses on the Grum botnet and uses evidence from our previous Trajectory study to help attribute its operator. CSI here we come!

January 30— The National Research Council’s study The Safety Challenge and Promise of Automotive Electronics: Insights from Unintended Acceleration was released on January 18th and, along its recommendations, argues for a more significant focus on cybersecurity issues (based largely on our joint work with University of Washington). Mainstream press coverage around this release and the issues of automotive cybersecurity include the LA Times, BusinessWeek. and MIT Technology Review. The last article suggests that industry is moving quickly and it documents a ten-fold increase in security staffing at GM’s OnStar division and the development of focused automotive security tams within both research and product companies. Our thanks to NSF for their support; its nice to see a project pay off.

December 8— Infographics rule! This week's BusinessWeek features a two page spread highlighting results from our research on spam economics. The data for these visuals are derived from two efforts: one led by Research Scientist Kirill Levchenko (spam value chain) and the other by CSE Ph.D. candidate Chris Kanich (spam revenue and demand) but both were a huge team effort (including the key help of our colleagues at ICSI as well)

December 6— Today's NY Times features a special section looking at the future of computing; nine essays written by nine computer scientists. Our own Stefan Savage penned one of these pieces, focusing on the future direction of security threats.

September 19— In the final days of summer, Marti Motoyama successfully defends his dissertation after years of abuse. Marti also makes a healthy decision to join FitBit this Fall. Congratulations, Marti!

June 6— In addition to our four USENIX Security papers, we just heard back that both of our WOOT and both of our CSET papers were accepted. Congrats to everyone!

June 6— In addition to our four USENIX Security papers, we just heard back that both of our WOOT and both of our CSET papers were accepted. Congrats to everyone!

May 19— As a sad day for the department, Chez Bob czar Michael Vrable defended his thesis today. Gone are the days of restocking, fridge cleaning, and soda machine hacking as he joins Google in Mountain View where someone else takes care of it all. It is also an unfortunate day for the UCSD Programming Contest team as well, as Michael retires as a long-time coach and mentor for so many students over the years. Congratulations, Michael! We already miss you — the soda machine is out of Coke again...

May 6— Damon McCoy, our CIFellow postdoc, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Congrats to both Damon and GMU!

April 18— USENIX Security paper notifications just came out and four UCSD papers were selected! Congrats to Danny Anderson, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Brian Kantor, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Marti Motoyama, Keaton Mowery, Stefan Savage, Hovav Shacham, and Geoff Voelker. We’ll see you all there!

March 13— Congratulations to Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Brian Kantor, and Danny Anderson, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, and Franziska Roesner, whose study of the vulnerability of modern cars to remote compromise was picked up by the press after being presented to the National Academy of Sciences. (We understand some faculty at UCSD and UW were involved as well.) The New York Times’ John Markoff broke the story; catch additional coverage in the Technology Review, PCWorld, Slashdot, Jamie Zawinski’s blog, Boing Boing, and The Volokh Conspiracy. More information at the CEASS site.

February 28— WIRED Magazine explains how to calculate the gross daily proceeds of spammers, based on the work of Chris Kanich and the rest of the Spamalytics crew.

February 17— Our colleagues in the Non-volatile Storage Lab have a neat paper about the challenges in erasing data from Flash-based SSDs. Good stuff. Also see Slashdot.

February 15— In recent history-sniffing news, the Release Candidate for IE9 adds history sniffing protections, and Scott Adams takes on history sniffing in a Dilbert strip.

January 31— Afer two years of effort, spanning two institutions and several person decades of effort, the “Click Trajectory” paper was accepted today to IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland). Congrats to all 15 authors! (also, congrats to UCSD alum Justin Ma and his Berkeley colleagues on their real-time URL filtering paper which was also accepted).

January 31— Following Stefano’s TCC best student paper last week, David Cash wins the Best Paper award (for the second year running!) at Eurocrypt 2011 for his paper “Efficient Authentication from Hard Learning Problems” (with Eike Kiltz, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Abhishek Jain, and Daniele Venturi).

January 21— Stefano Tessaro wins the Best Student Paper award at TCC 2011 for his paper “Security Amplification for the Cascade of Arbitrarily Weak PRPs: Tight Bounds via the Interactive Hardcore Lemma.” Congrats!

December 10— The Skein cryptographic hash function, designed by a team including UCSD’s Mihir Bellare and UCSD alum Yoshi Kohno, has been selected as one of five finalists chosen in NIST’s SHA-3 competition, which will select a new standard hash to replace SHA-1. Sixty-four proposed hash function designs were submitted to NIST when the competition began two years ago. Congratulations to Mihir, Yoshi and the rest of their team!

December 08— Stefan Savage was named an ACM Fellow “for contributions to large scale systems and network security.” Read our press release here.

November 30— Lots of press for Dongseok Jang’s recent history sniffing study (with three faculty co-authors in Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner and Hovav Shacham—the standard faculty/student ratio here at UCSD). The paper was published at CCS in October, but got a second wind in the press, perhaps due to its being cited in a speech by David Vladeck, the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, or due to the recent House “Do Not Track” hearings, or maybe due to the prurient aspects of some of the sites studied. Regardless, congrats to everyone! Catch coverage in Forbes (×2, ×3, ×4, ×5, ×6), Above the Law, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press (×2), MediaPost (×2, ×3, ×4), The BBC, The Register, The Telegraph, PC World, Network World (×2), CNet, InformationWeek, PC Magazine (×2), Technology Review, eWeek, TIME, TechDirt, ZDNet, ZDNet UK, The Huffington Post, Slashdot (×2), Jamie Zawinski’s blog, Boing Boing, Reddit, Krebs on Security, Ars Technica, The New York Times, and our own eventual press release.

August 11— Marti Motoyama’s new study on CAPTCHA-solving economics (conducted with with Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Damon McCoy, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage) was covered in Technology Review and later by Brian Krebs in his widely-read security blog. More detail on this “epic new analysis” can be found in the “seminal paper” located here. Stefan Savage discussed the work as well on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

June 21— Tom Ristenpart successfully defended his thesis today, on “New Approaches for the Design and Analysis of Cryptographic Hash Functions.” In the fall he will be joining the tenure track at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Congratulations, Prof. Ristenpart!

June 4— Scott Yilek successfully defended his thesis today, on “Public-Key Encryption Secure in the Presence of Randomness Failures.” In the fall he will be joining the tenure track at the University of St. Thomas. Congratulations, Prof. Yilek!

June 2— Following Petros and Scott’s PKC best paper last week, David Cash wins the Best Paper award at Eurocrypt 2010 for his paper “Bonsai Trees, or How to Delegate a Lattice Basis” (with Dennis Hofheinz, Eike Kiltz, and Chris Peikert).

May 27— Petros Mol and Scott Yilek win the Best Paper award at PKC 2010 for their paper “Chosen-Ciphertext Security from Slightly Lossy Trapdoor Functions.” Congrats! Also at PKC, Daniele Micciancio gives an invited talk on “Duality in Lattice Cryptography.”

May 17— Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Brian Kantor, Danny Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and collaborators at the University of Washington led by Yoshi Kohno (UCSD alum!) describe how to hack cars in their paper at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. More information at the CEASS site and in articles in JSOE News, New York Times, New Scientist, Technology Review, and PC World.

April 05— Stefan Savage was quoted in a San Diego Daily Transcript round-table meeting on cybersecurity.

March 30— Mihir Bellare awarded ACM’s 2009 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, along with Phillip Rogaway, for “their development of the field of Practice-Oriented Provable-Security and its widespread impact on the theory and practice of cryptography and security.”

March 21— Justin Ma, International Man of Mystery, First of the Tri-advised, Duke of Auto-Tune, Teacher of Pandas and Defender of the Web sucessfully defended his dissertation, “Learning to Detect Malicious URLs.” Justin is now on the whirlwind talk circuit, but will shortly be joining UC Berkeley as a postdoc. Congrats Justin!

February 9— Daniele Micciancio is program chair of TCC 2010.

January 25— New Scientist article about the Botnet Judo paper by Andreas Pitsillidis, Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage, and coauthors.

September 27— Stefan Savage gets featured in Voice of San Diego story.

September 3— Press for Tom Ristenpart, Hovav Shacham and Stefan Savage for their recent paper examining placement vulnerabilities in third-party cloud computing.

September 4— Press for our AVC Advantage paper: NPR’s Talk of the Nation—Science Friday; KPBS; The Register; Dark Reading; PC World; InformationWeek; Canwest; The Hindustan Times; Slashdot; Digg; Ars Technica; Engadget.

August 10— Stephen Checkoway, in collaboration with Hovav Shacham, Brian Kantor, and their co-authors from Michigan and Princeton, recently demonstrated a practical attack against the AVC Advantage voting machine—absent any access to source code and overcoming a hardware architecture that prevents code execution from DRAM. More info can be found in the Jacobs School press release here or in their EVT ’09 paper here.

July 16— Network World magazine quotes Stefan Savage today in its story on Canadian Pharmacy spam.

June 15— Geoff Voelker received one of sixty national HP 2009 Innovation Research grants to support our ongoing studies of Internet-based eCrime. More information can be found here.

May 1— Network World magazine’s list of “20 kick-ass network research projects’ includes three efforts with UCSD creators including Tom Ristenpart’s Adeona laptop tracking service (USENIX Security ’08, w/UW collaborators). Also, on the sysnet side of the house: Yuvraj Agarwal’s Somniloquy system for power savings (NSDI ’09, w/Microsoft collaborators) and Kirill Levchenko’s XL routing protocol (SIGCOMM ’08). Congrats to everyone for all the ass-kicking!

February 25— Google just announced their Native Client Security Contest for which Stefan Savage has agreed to be one of the judges. Good luck everyone!

February 21— Stefan Savage was quoted in John Markoff’s recent New York Times article Do We Need a New Internet and, even more influential, the infamous CCC blog :-)

December 30— Lots of press for Tom Ristenpart’s USENIX Security paper describing Adeona, a system that helps track stolen laptops in a privacy-preserving manner. A collaboration with University of Washington researchers including alum Yoshi Kohno), Adeona has been downloaded by over 50,000 people and has been covered in reports ranging frm the San Francisco Chronicle to Slashdot. See Tom describe Adeona in this short video or read more in press releases from UCSD and UW.

November 6— As some of you many know, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is running a public competition to develop a new crytopgraphic hash function for a range of applications. Our own Mihir Bellare as well as alum Yoshi Kohno are part of the team that has developed and submitted the Skein Hash Function. It has received some coverage at places like Wired, Slashdot, Dark Reading, and Arstechnica.

November 5— Brian Krebs of the Washington Post recently wrote about our paper on spam conversion rates (joint with ICSI). From there it snowballed a bit. Here are some pointers to derivative stories: The Register, Network World, BBC News, Slashdot, Arstechnica, Schneier’s blog, etc.

October 30— Our recent paper on duplicating house keys from photos has received a bit of press (e.g., MSNBC, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, CNET, CNET [again], The Register, Dark Reading, and others).

October 27— Erik Buchanan and Ryan Roemer got written up in both Information Week and Dark Reading for their work on generalizing return-oriented programming.

September 3— Kirill Levchenko defended his thesis today. “XL”ent work, Dr. Levchenko. Kirill continues on as a postdoc with the group.

February 07— Justin Ma was named one of three recipients of Symantec’s new Research Labs Graduate Fellowship. Congrats Justin!

September 8— Sumeet Singh has been named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review magazine. Read the full release here. Congrats Summeet!

June 27— David Anderson was awarded an AFCEA Lockheed Martin Graduate Scholarship for Science and Technology. Congratulations, David!

June 9— Barath Raghavan has been awarded a Woolley Graduate Leadership Fellowship by the Jacobs School recognizing his academic achievements and service to the department. Congrats Barath!

May 15— Flavio Junqueira sucessfully defended his thesis and will be leaving us to join Yahoo Research in Barcelona. Congrants Flavio! (Expect vistors.)

March 31— NSF announced today the results of the 2006 NSF Graduate Fellowship competition. Michael Vrable was recognized as a fellow and Justin Ma was awarded an honorable mention. Congrats to Michael and Justin!

February 15— UCSD recently acknowledged what the rest of us already know: that Geoff Voelker is one of the top teachers around. Geoff was named to receive the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Award for “excellence in undergraduate teaching”—one of only three Engineering faculty to receive the award in its 16 year history (and the only recipient ever from Computer Science). Congrats Geoff!

June 28— Alper Mizrak is the recipient of this year’s IEEE William C. Carter Award, which is presented annually to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to dependable computing through their dissertation research. The award is attached to this year’s DSN paper, Fatih: Detecting and Isolating Malicious Routers, with Yu-Chung Cheng and their advisors. Congrats!

June 27— Cisco has announced plans to acquire Netsift, Inc. today. Congrats to George, Sumeet and the whole Netsift team! The UCSD press release can be found here.

April 15— Stefan Savage is profiled in the San Diego Union-Tribune where he describes his life as a cat-herder.

December 15— George Varghese’s new book Network Algorithmics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices was just published by Morgan Kauffman.

September 21— The Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CIED) has been selected by the National Science Foundation as one of two large-scale projects in its new CyberTrust program. The CIED effort, a collaboration between our group and the International Computer Science Institute&squo;s Center for Internet Research, will receive $6.2M over five years in addition to industrial support from Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and the UCSD Center for Networked Systems (a $10M research center supported by AT&T, Alcatel, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm and Sun Microsystems). CIED will study large-scale Internet-based pathogens—such as worms and viruses—analyze their behaviors, develop early-warning and forensic capabilities and design automated defense technologies. CIED is led by Stefan Savage at UCSD and Vern Paxson at ICSI with co-PIs including Geoff Voelker, George Varghese, and Nick Weaver. Officially announcing the award are NSF's press release and a joint press release from UCSD and ICSI. Media coverage of the center's founding can be found at MSNBC, InternetWeek, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor.

September 1— Cristian Estan has been awarded the UCSD Departmental Dissertation award. Congrats Cristi!

May 31— Cristian Estan has accepted a tenure-track position from the University of Wisconsin’s Computer Science Department. Congrats Cristi and good luck!

March 31— Three of our graduate students were recognized in the 2004 NSF Graduate Fellowship competition. Current student Barath Raghavan was selected as a fellow, while Chris Tuttle was awarded an honorable mention. As well, Lisa Cowan, who will be joining us in Fall 2004 was also selected as a fellow. Congratulations to Barath, Chris and Lisa!

February 23— Stefan Savage has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation faculty research fellowship for 2004. These fellowships recognize young faculty “who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge.” Stefan is the second in the Systems and Networking group to receive this honor—Amin Vahdat received a Sloan Fellowship in 2003. More information on UCSD Sloan recipeints for 2004 can be found here

August 29— The National Science Foundation recently awarded a $1.8 million Research Infrastructure grant to UCSD CSE. The award will fund a five year project to build a high-speed wired and wireless communications, computation and storage grid in the department. Andrew Chien led the proposal, with co-PIs Joesph Pasquale, Stefan Savage and David Kriegman (Vision). More information can be found here.

August 8— John Bellardo’s recent presentation at the USENIX Security Symposium included a live demonstration of shutting down all wireless communications using a pocket PC. See descriptions of the event in Government Computer News and Techworld. This work was fully described in his paper 802.11 Denial-of-Service Attacks: Real Vulnerabilities and Practical Solutions, jointly authored with Stefan Savage.

February 7— David Moore and Stefan Savage were part of a team that recently analyzed the spread of the Sapphire/Slammer worm. They showed that the worm compromised 90 percent of its victims within the first 10 minutes, reaching a peak probing rate of over 50 million probes per second. The results were widely reported (including CNN, the Washington Post, and InfoWorld). The full report can be found here.

December 19— George Varghese was honored as an ACM Fellow for his contributions in efficient, scalable algorithms.

January 10— Professor Stefan Savage finally defended his thesis. He received the University of Washington's William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award for this work.

September 1— International fashionplates David Moore, Geoff Voelker, and Stefan Savage grace the cover of this month’s Information Security Magazine for their analysis of denial-of-service attacks. Sure to be a collector’s item! :-)

August 13— David Moore, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage received the best paper award award at the USENIX Security Symposium for their paper Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity. Congrats guys!

May 25— There has been considerable press around the previous denial-of-service report, including stories or mentions in The New York Times, CNN , Wired and New Scientist. A more complete listing can be found here.

May 22— Geoff Voelker received the Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Engineering Teaching Award. Great going Geoff!

May 21— Group members David Moore, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage recently completed the first empirical study of world-wide denial-of-service attack activity. They found roughly 4000 attacks active per week against over 5,000 distinct targets. More information can be found here.