Umesh Shankar

ushankar@cs.berkeley.edu

 

Education

University of California, Berkeley (2000-2006) ­--- degree to be conferred in December 2006

Ph.D. in computer science: research in information security and privacy, advised by David Wagner

M.S. in Computer Science completed in 2002, work on Network Intrusion Detection

 

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1995-1999)

B.A. in Computer Science, June 1999, magna cum laude

 

Cheshire High School, Cheshire, CT (1991-95), Class Salutatorian

 

Experience

Google, Inc.

August 2006-

Member of the Applications security group.

 

IBM Research, T. J. Watson Laboratory

May 2004-August 2004

Worked in Secure Systems group on trusted computing and information-flow security, with a focus on usability and formal verification. Continuing collaboration to develop formal methods for integrity verification.

 

International Computer Science Institute

October 2003-December 2004

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

January 2002-September 2003

Development on Bro Network Intrusion Detection System, primarily in developing language features.

 

AT&T Center for Internet Research (www.aciri.org)

May 2001-December 2001

Research on network intrusion detection with Vern Paxson. Worked on formalism for attacking the "stepping stone" problem; developed a gdb-compatible debugger/tracer for the Bro Network Intrusion Detection System.

 

Idiom, Inc., Waltham, MA (www.idiominc.com)

June 1999-May 2001

Worked on architecture, design, and development team for WorldServer® 2.0 and 3.0 products. Implemented patented linkage technology; designed and implemented database connectivity; co-designed patented Translation Memory system; designed next-generation workflow system; co-designed and implemented single sign-on security architecture; research on machine translation and efficient approximate matching.

 

Tabors, Caramanis and Assoc., Cambridge, MA (www.tca-us.com)

May 1998-May 1999

Designed and developed an electricity cost-optimization system for industrial consumers of electric power using mixed-integer programming (MIP) in C++, with a user interface in Visual Basic and rate data in Microsoft Access. Developed efficient approximation algorithm for solving the otherwise intractable MIP.

 

XA Entertainment, Inc.

April 1996-August 1998

Co-founded and served as President. Developed The Llerian Cycle Vol. I: The Forging of Anthryst, a three-dimensional strategy and action game for Windows. Developed custom 3D engine, and a compiler for a custom object-oriented scripting language as well as a runtime interpreter. Event-driven architecture and AI engine also developed.

 

Cornerstone Internet Solutions Co. (formerly Enteractive, Inc.)

June 1997-September 1997

Did intranet/extranet web development including database-driven Active Server Pages for clients to track progress and changes to their web sites as they are being created. Created web-based job tracking and internal accounting systems.

 

Harvard University

September 1995-June 1997

Worked on Tarantula web-server design project. Prepared different implementations of HTTP servers (single- and multi-threaded) and did performance testing and analysis. Worked on the PEPT (Portable Executable Patching Tool) project and other operating-system benchmarking and testing tools.

 

 

Lyriq International Corp.

January 1994-December 1995

Developer for Windows 95 edition of Picture Perfect Golf. Also created a three-dimensional polygon rendering engine for putting greens for incorporation into the next release. Picture Perfect Golf was selected as one of PC Magazine's Top 100 CD-ROMs overall.

 

 

Publications

 

Umesh Shankar and Chris Karlof. "Doppelganger: Better Browser Privacy Without the Bother". To appear in Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2006), October 2006.  

 

Umesh Shankar and David Wagner. "Preventing Secret Leakage from fork(): Securing Privilege-Separated Applications". To appear in Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Communications (Network Security and Information Assurance Symposium at ICC 2006), June 2006.

 

Umesh Shankar, Trent Jaeger, and Reiner Sailer. “Toward Automated Information-Flow Integrity Verification for Security-Critical Applications.” To appear in Proceedings of the 13th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2006), February 2006.

 

Umesh Shankar, Monica Chew, J. D. Tygar. "Side effects are not sufficient to authenticate software." In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004. 

 

Naveen Sastry, Umesh Shankar, David Wagner. "Secure verification of Location Claims." RSA Labs CryptoBytes vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 2004.

 

Umesh Shankar. Tech Report: UCB//04-1300: "Self-Tuning Energy-Aware Multichannel (STEAM) Scheduling." University of California, Berkeley. March 2004.

 

Naveen Sastry, Umesh Shankar, David Wagner. “Secure verification of Location Claims.” ACM Workshop on Wireless Security (WiSe 2003). September 19, 2003.

 

Umesh Shankar and Vern Paxson. “Active Mapping: Resisting NIDS Evasion Without Altering Traffic.”  Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2003.

 

Umesh Shankar. Master's Thesis. Technical Report UCB//CSD-2-03-1246. "Active Mapping: Resisting NIDS Evasion Without Altering Traffic." University of California, Berkeley. December, 2002.

 

David L. Donoho, Ana Georgina Flesia, Umesh Shankar, Vern Paxson, Jason Coit, and Stuart Staniford. "Multiscale Stepping-Stone Detection: Detecting Pairs of Jittered Interactive Streams by Exploiting Maximum Tolerable Delay."  Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, 5th International Symposium. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2516, Wespi et al., eds., Springer, New York. 2002.

 

Umesh Shankar, Kunal Talwar, Jeffrey S. Foster, and David Wagner. “Automated Detection of Format-String Vulnerabilities Using Type Qualifiers”. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2001.

 

Other Research Activities

External reviewer for IEEE Security and Privacy, USENIX Security, Financial Cryptography conferences

External reviewer for Workshop on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection

Book chapter review for Bulusu and Jha, eds., “Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective”

 

Honors and Awards

Awarded U.S. Patent No. 6,782,384, “Method of and system for splitting and/or merging content to facilitate content processing” in August 2004.

 

2001-2004 National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship Recipient

 

Recipient of John Harvard Scholarship, 1996-97 and 1997-98

Recipient of Harvard College Scholarship, 1995-96

Robert C. Byrd Scholarship Recipient (given by State of CT, renewed for 4 years)

 


Technical Skills

Platforms:

Microsoft Windows, UNIX (Linux, Solaris, BSD), Mozilla

Programming:

C/C++, Assembly (x86, DEC Alpha, MIPS Rx000), Perl, Visual Basic, Javascript

 

SQL, Win32/MFC, HTML, Active Server Pages/ADODB, DirectX

 

Extracurricular Activities

Winner of 2005 University Symphony Concerto Contest, soloist with orchestra in Spring 2006

Principal Clarinetist, UC Berkeley University Symphony

Clarinetist, various chamber music groups

Recreational/intramural Ultimate, softball, football, basketball, soccer

Volunteered in Writer’s Room program to coach middle school students on writing (2 hrs/week)

 

First place, Connecticut All-State Audition on Clarinet

Principal Clarinet, All-State & Regional Orchestras, New Haven Youth Symphony