Bio:

Alex Snoeren joined the UCSD faculty in 2002, after completing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Snoeren has served as a research scientist with BBN Technologies since 1999, and has a patent pending for his work on denial of service detection software. Snoeren graduated with highest honors from Georgia Tech with B.S. degrees in Applied Mathematics and in Computer Science, where he also received an M.S. in Computer Science.

Professor Snoeren believes that most of today's networked applications should be designed for mobile computing and his goal is to create standard mobility support services that can easily be used by software programmers. Most recently, he created Migrate, a novel mobility framework that allows mobile devices such as laptops to seamlessly run networked applications even when the Internet connection is intermittent. His work solves one of the most frustrating problems in mobile computing in which applications are forced to abort active sessions when the Internet connection is lost, requiring the user to manually reestablish connection to the server and restart the application. Among Snoeren's other research projects, he works on identifying the source of denial of service attacks that plague the Internet, in which an intruder sends false messages that cause a service to collapse. Tracing the path that leads to the intruder is challenging because the intruder typically uses fake source addresses. At BBN Technologies, Snoeren was one of the lead developers of a novel approach in which routers efficiently stored copies of all packets that they have forwarded for later use in trace-back. This is the first system that can identify the source of attack through just one packet.