Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
Northwestern University, IL·Computer Science
Every time you visit a website, your computer first asks the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet's phonebook, to translate a name like example.com into a numeric address. Whoever answers that question learns what you are looking for and can also refuse to answer, which makes DNS an easy tool for snooping and censorship.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
Domain Name System
Internet privacy
censorship resistance
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Co-design Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols, based on cryptography such as homomorphic encryption, that let a DNS server resolve domain names without learning which name was requested.
- Build and release an open-source, incrementally deployable private DNS system and test whether its query speed, traffic overhead and database size are practical.
- Develop the theory and design of edge-based streaming analytics using "semantic cookies", encrypted data structures stored by clients that edge network components can process.
- Implement and evaluate the edge analytics system, and analyze its security, privacy and reliability.
More about the research
A related problem is speed: online data is most valuable the moment it arrives, but analytics systems only see a user's request once it reaches a distant server. The lab's two projects rethink core Internet infrastructure for privacy and speed.
Why it matters
A private DNS could stop Internet providers and others from seeing which sites people visit and make a common form of government censorship much harder, supporting open Internet access. Edge-based analytics could give advertising, finance and online machine-learning applications faster triggers. It could also let Internet service providers and content networks offer analytics as a service.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Minxuan Zhou
Illinois Institute of Technology, IL·Computer Science
Design a domain-specific programming language that makes it easier to write general fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) applications across different algorithmic schemes.
Kenneth Calvert
University of Kentucky, KY·Computer Science
Determine where and how to connect Named-data Networking (NDN), which fetches data by name, inside a network domain with SCION, a secure routing system that carries traffic between domains.
Somali Chaterji
Purdue University, IN·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop on-device machine learning analytics for farm sensors that adapt to each device's computing power, changing network conditions and competition from co-located applications.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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