Last fall I moved to Berkeley and started as a postdoc in the EECS department for Vern Paxson. I’ve been there now for about 4 months working on a number of different security topics ranging from web security to bot nets.
On the web front we just found out that we have a paper in WWW 2010 on a system named Alhambra, that was the third (and final) part of my dissertation.
On bots, I’ve taken some responsibility on the farming of bots, including testing new malware binaries, attempting to identify malware, and keeping bots running in an environment where we can monitor them.
Another interesting project has involved Twitter (with Steve and Kurt), and I’ve been doing a lot of infrastructure work to get our code running on the scale we need. Python, Amazon’s EC2, and the multiprocessing library seem to be the key so far to making things work the scale we are aiming for.
Finally, climbing – There’s been a lot of weekend trips since I moved here: Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Pinnacles national monument, Mount Diablo, Bishop, Owns River gorge, Castle Rock state park, and probably others. Climbing a lot at Berkeley Ironworks too.