Summer 2006 was a good summer, definitely a good time, good job, and fun place. I worked in Berkeley, CA and lived right down the street from ICIR where I worked. Berkeley pretty much had everything I wanted and if its wasn’t downtown Berkeley, then its just a short subway (BART) ride to get there. There was a lot of things going on, and lots of crazy people wandering around (like me) at all times of the day.
As for my job, I worked with Vern Paxson on creating anonymization policy for application layer protocols. In my first couple weeks, I ported anonymizers for DNS and HTTP. After I did that I was familiar with the Bro IDS code and BINPAC, and was able to implement a parser for the SMB/CIFS protocol (as well as Netbios, MS Browse, and some RPC/named pipe functionality). The end result is a detailed parser for CIFS that can also rewrite packets in an anonymized form. This is the protocol that does most of the things in Network Neighborhood and allows users to mount network drives and do network file system operations. Its a complicated protocol, with many things going on that make it hard to parse (an anonymize).
