Craig Labovitz

Craig Labovitz

Chief Scientist, Arbor Networks
2727 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel: (734) 276-4194
labovit@umich.edu

http://www.monkey.org/~labovit
twitter: @labovit

Current

Craig Labovitz is Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks where he is responsible for the core technology, architecture and commercial strategy behind Arbor's successful carrier security products.

Dr. Labovitz is a recognized expert on Internet infrastructure security and cyber threats. His research lead both to the technology in Arbor's carrier security products as well as ATLAS, Arbor Network's global, real-time Internet infrastructure security monitoring system. Labovitz's analysis of Internet scale threats and traffic, including government censorship, DDoS and the evolution of Internet peering, has generated important new findings and garnered global media attention. In a recent article, Wired Magazine praised ATLAS as "likely knowing more about the Internet's ebbs and flows than anyone outside of the National Security Agency".

In the 1990s, his research demonstrated fundamental limitations in the core routing architecture of the Internet. His seminal work on Internet routing stability and convergence served as a catalyst for significant changes in commercial Internet routing software implementation and impacted routing policies employed by Internet Service Providers throughout the world. His work was recently recognized with an ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award in 2008.

His security and traffic engineering technology commercialized at Arbor is deployed in more than 400 Internet Service Providers, cable operators, content providers, and mission-critical networks around the globe. Today, over 70 percent of Internet backbone transit traffic is protected by products stemming from his research. Tektronix Communications, a division of Danaher, acquired Arbor in August, 2010.

In addition to his extensive commercial product and research background, Dr. Labovitz has over a decade of operational network engineering experience. He served as one of the original engineers for the NSFNet backbone and later the Internet Routing Registry and Routing Arbiter. He has also served as a consultant on diverse range of network engineering projects, including Sprint's first Internet email infrastructure, design of the Department of Defense research network, and the first commercial aviation Internet service. Labovitz also played important roles in early IPv6 engineering and the 6Bone precursor to the today's IPv6 Internet. Dr. Labovitz is an active participant in the global network engineering community, including service on the program committee and as the Chair of North American Network Operators Group (NANOG).

Dr. Labovitz's research interests include large scale distributed systems, fixed and mobile carrier infrastructure security, traffic engineering, and network architectures.

Labovitz is the author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed networking research papers, journal articles and patents. His research has been cited thousands of times in national media articles and academic publications. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic conferences. Dr. Labovitz received his PhD and MSE from the University of Michigan and his BSE from the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Background

Chief Scientist, Arbor Networks (2007-present)
Responsible for overall company strategy, technical direction, research, and product design / architecture as well as company and product evangelism.

Chief Architect, Arbor Networks (2003-2007)
Product development, engineering group management, technical leadership, design of all security detection and mitigation algorithms.

Director of Engineering, Arbor Networks (2001-2003)
Engineering / QA management. Product management, design, and development. Sales engineering and support.

Microsoft (1999-2001)
Member of the Networking and Systems Research Group contributing to the first Windows IPv6 implementation (including v6 Routing) and conducting network security and routing research.

Principal Investigator, Merit Networks (1996-2000)
Principal investigator and project director of several National Science Foundation and industry (MSF, Microsoft, Intel) research projects. Directed team of faculty, graduate student and professional staff researchers.

Director of Engineering, Merit Networks (1996-2000)
Managed research and development group working on next-generation technologies, including IPv6, wireless and security. Additional responsibilities included Internet Routing Registry development and commercial service, NANOG (including serving as the conference chair), the Routing Arbiter project and several National Science Foundation and Defense Department research grants.

Backbone Engineer, Merit Networks (1992-1996)
NSFNet backbone engineering and oncall / operations / planning. Responsible for router configuration, tool development, network trouble-shooting and operations.

Cardiothoracic Imaging Research Center, Researcher (1990-1992)
Member of research team developing image processing algorithms and visualization techniques for large-scale volumetric studies of the heart.

 

Education

University of Michigan
Phd (dissertation: "Scalability of the Internet Routing Infrastructure")
MSE Computer Science Engineering

University of Pennsylvania
BSE Computer Science / Electrical Engineering
Minor in Mathematics
Cum Laude

 

Selected Papers

Internet Inter-Domain Traffic
Craig Labovitz, Scott Iekel-Johnson, Danny McPherson, Jon Oberheide, and Farnam Jahanian
Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2010, New Delhi. August, 2010.
PDF   Slides

Experiences With Monitoring OSPF on a Regional Service Provider Network
David Watson, Farnam Jahanian and Craig Labovitz
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. May 19-22, 2003.
PDF

The Impact of Internet Policy and Topology on Delayed Routing Convergence
Craig Labovitz, Abha Ahuja and Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2001
PDF

Delayed Internet Routing Convergence
Craig Labovitz, Abha Ahuja, Abhijit Bose, and Farnam Jahanian
Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2000
Version also appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 2001.
PDF   Slides

Origins of Internet Routing Instability
Craig Labovitz, Gerald Malan, and Farnam Jahanian
Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 1999
PDF

Experimental Study of Internet Stability and Wide-Area Backbone Failures
Craig Labovitz, Abha Ahuja, and Farnam Jahanian
Proc. International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing 1998
PDF

Internet Routing Instability
Craig Labovitz, G. Robert Malan and Farnam Jahanian
Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 1997, Cannes, France.
Also version appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 1997
1998 Best Paper Award
2008 ACM Test of Time Award
PDF

 

Selected Technical Reports

Six Months, Six Providers and IPv6
Craig Labovitz. March, 2011

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report VI
Craig Labovitz, Roland Dobbins and Carlos Morales. January, 2011.

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report V
Craig Labovitz, Roland Dobbins and Danny McPherson. January, 2010.

Tracking the IPv6 Migration
Scott Iekel-Johnson, Craig Labovitz, and Danny McPherson
Arbor Technical Report, August 2008.

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report IV
Craig Labovitz, and Danny McPherson. January, 2009.

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report III
Craig Labovitz, Danny McPherson and Mike Hollyman. Sept, 2007.

Shining Light on Dark Address Space
Craig Labovitz, Abha Ahuja, Michael Bailey. December, 2001.

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report II
Craig Labovitz and Danny McPherson. Sept, 2006.

World-Wide Network Infrastructure Security Report I
Craig Labovitz and Danny McPherson. Sept, 2005.

 

Selected Recent Presentations

Internet Traffic 2007 - 2011
Global Peering Forum. Santi Monica, CA. April 2011.
Slides    Conference

3G Mobile/Packet Core Security and Engineering Challenges
A look at mobile infrastructure security trends and open problems including 3G attack surface and protocol vulnerabilities. NANOG 51. Miami, Florida. February 2011.
Slides    Conference

Egypt Traffic Disruption
Presentation at NANOG security BOF on ongoing Egypt traffic disruptions. Slides also presented during main session lightening talks. NANOG 51. Miami, Florida. February 2011.
Slides

How Not to Start a Startup and Save the Internet
Xconomy Forum: 5x5. A presentation on the history of the Internet, Arbor's startup "big-idea" and the future of network security. Boston, MA. December 8, 2010.
Slides   Conference

Rethinking Computing
ATT CyberSecurity Conference panel discussion. October 13 2010. Middletown, NJ
Conference

Botnets, DDoS and Ground-Truth -- A Look at 5,000 Operator Confirmed Attacks
NANOG50. Atlanta, Georgia. October 3, 2010
Slides Conference

The End of the Internet and Why Analysts Should Care
Yankee Group Quarterly Meeting. Invited talk. Boston, MA. September 29, 2010.

Internet Inter-domain Traffic
ACM SIGCOMM. New Delhi, India. August 2010.
Slides  Conference  Paper

The Rapid Consolidation of Internet Content
IETF 77 Plenary / Keynote. Invited Talk. Anaheim, CA. March 2010.
Slides

The Future of Internet Traffic and Topology
Telefonica / Cambridge 2020 Networking Summit. Invited talk. Madrid, Spain. June 2010.
Conference

Fifth Annual Infrastructure Security Survey
NANOG 48. Atlanta Georgia, 2010.
Slides   Conference

2009 Internet Observatory Report
NANOG 47. Dearborn, Michigan. October 2009.
Slides   Conference

A One Year Measurement Study of IPv6 Inter-Domain Traffic in the Internet
NANOG 44. Los Angelas, CA. October 2008.
Slides   Conference

BGP Flow Specification
NANOG 38. St. Louis, Missouri. October 2006.
Slides   Conference

 

Research Projects

  • IPv6 Routing Security
    (1 yr / Microsoft grant, principal investigator)

    Developed IPv6 routing implementation for the Microsoft Windows / NT platform and researched security implications.

  • Internet Measurement Performance Analysis (IPMA)
    (3 yr / $1.8 million NSF grant, principal investigator)

    A large scale study of the evolving commercial Internet routing and IXP / peering infrastructure. Project developed some of the first Internet visualization and traffic analysis tools. Research uncovered significant unexpected properties / flaws in Internet routing and security.

  • Merit Routing Toolkit (MRT)
    (2 yr / $1.2 million NSF grant, principal investigator)

    One of the first open-source implementations of core routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, RIP, etc.) and IPv6 protocols. The project explored scalability of Internet routing and uncovered wide-spread, critical flaws in most commercial routers. Now an IETF standard, MRT protocols form the basis for most routing protocol export / storage.


 

Representative Recent Press

 

Patents

System and Method for Correlating Traffic and Routing Information
Craig H. Labovitz. United States patent 7,529,192. Issued May 13, 2010.
Patent describes core technology behind Arbor's traffic engineering product and topology based DDoS detection.

Method and System for Annotating Network Flow Information
Craig Labovitz, Joseph Eggleston, and Scott Iekel-Johnson. June, 2008. (pending)
Patent describes key distributed communication protocol used by Arbor products to synchronize large volumes of traffic and security data between appliances.

Method and System for Monitoring Control Signal Traffic over a Computer Network
Craig Labovitz. United States Patent 7,844,696. Issued November 30, 2010.
Patent describes Arbor technology for detecting infrastructure attacks through the analysis of router telemetry (routing and flow statistics).

System and Method for Decreasing Convergence Time in Routing Information
Craig Labovitz. (Microsoft, pending) June 8, 2001.

 

Selected Blog Posts

 

Recent Students / Interns

Kelsey Harris (Dartmouth undergraduate, summer 2010)
Haakon Ringberg (Princeton PhD student, summer 2009)

 

Community Service

NANOG:
 Conference Chair 1998-2001
 Program Committee: 1998-2005.

IETF:
 Contributor to IDR, RPSL, GROW and CIDR working groups
 Co-author of MRT RFC
 Contributor to FlowSpec RFC

Internet2:
 Routing and Security Research Working Groups

Open Source Code:
 MRT: One of the first open source routing libraries (BGP, OSPF, RIP, etc).
 IRRd: Internet routing registry daemon used in production by a number of the registries.

Academic Program Committees:
  ACM CoNEXT 2011 (conference site)
  SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, IMC, FTCS, PAM
  IEEE / ACM Transactions on Networking

Industry and Government Panels:
  FCC Open Internet Challenge 2011 Judge (FCC Challenge Web Site)
  Various NSF review panels / grant proposals
  Various textbook reviews (
Interconnections, Routing in the Internet, etc.)

 

Tutorials

Backbone Attack Detection and Mitigation Methodologies
Danny McPherson, Craig Labovitz, and Farnam Jahanian
Tutorial at the ACM SIGCOMM 2005 Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

Various security seminars and training for carriers and government organizations.

 

Awards

1997 University of Michigan Teaching Excellence Award
1998 ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award
2008 ACM Test of Time Award (press release and panel discussion)

More than 20 company and innovation awards granted to Arbor Networks since 2001 including Techworld Award for Security Product Of The Year, Information Security Product Award, and Inc 500 Award.

 

 


Last modified: Wed Jul 27 15:12:32 EDT 2011