Dr. Daphne Yao’s doctoral student Hao Zhang successfully defended his dissertation on October 8, 2015. Hao’s research lies in the area of network security, and more specifically, traffic dependence analysis for network anomaly detection. His thesis work detects stealthy malware activities through analyzing causal relations among network requests. Applications of this analysis include the detection of data exfiltration, bot and spyware activities. Tools developed in Hao’s thesis research provide rich contextual and structural information associated with network events. They can be used by security analysts to help reason about the security alerts. He and Dr. Yao have a pending continuous-in-part (CIP) patent on this anomaly detection technology. Hao Zhang will join the database security team at Oracle, Redwood Shores CA, starting from January 2016.
Dissertation Defenses
