Brad Karp
Professor of Computer Systems and Networks
Head of Systems and Networks Research Group
Department of Computer Science
University College London

Gower Street
London, WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Office: 169 Euston Road, Room 207
Voice: +44 20 7679 0406

Current Teaching

Computer Science 0019: Computer Systems (formerly 3007), Spring 2019 (past years: 2018)
Computer Science 0133: Distributed Systems and Security (formerly M030/GZ03), Fall 2019 (past years: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006)

Past Teaching

Computer Science 3035 / GZ01: Networked Systems, Fall 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009
Computer Science M038 / GZ06: Mobile and Cloud Computing, Spring 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

Steering committee member:

  • ACM HotOS Workshop (2019-)
  • ACM SIGCOMM Conference (2016-2019)
  • ACM HotNets Workshop (2009-2014)
  • Program committee member:

  • SOSP 2024, 2019, 2017, 2015
  • OSDI 2023, 2010
  • SIGCOMM 2022, 2019, 2016, 2015 (PC co-chair), 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009 ("heavy"), 2006 ("light")
  • HotOS 2019
  • ASPLOS 2019
  • Oakland 2017
  • HotNets 2017 (PC co-chair), 2008
  • NSDI 2016, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008, 2007
  • EuroSys 2013
  • IPSN 2010, 2006
  • MobiCom 2008, 2005, 2004
  • SenSys 2007
  • IPTPS 2006
  • WORLDS 2005 (PC co-chair), 2004 (at OSDI 2004)
  • INFOCOM 2005
  • NetDB 2005 (at ICDE 2005)
  • Recent and Upcoming Talks

  • Google (Sunnyvale, CA), October 3rd, 2019
  • Frontiers in Security and Privacy (EPFL), June 3rd, 2013
  • 13th Annual High-Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Conference (NSA), May 7th, 2013
  • EPFL Summer Research Institute, July 18th, 2008
  • COST ARCADIA US-EU Workshop: From Fundamentals to Infrastructure--Steps Toward the Future Internet, December 4th, 2006
  • NSF Workshop on Geometric Approaches to Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, June 12th-13th, 2006
  • Google Labs (Mountain View, CA), May 11th, 2006
  • Harvard University CS Department Colloquium, February 2nd, 2006
  • Stanford University CS Networking Seminar, November 10th, 2005
  • Biography

    Brad Karp earned a B.S. at Yale University in 1992, an S.M. at Harvard University in 1995, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2000, all in Computer Science. In his dissertation, he designed robust and scalable geographic routing algorithms and protocols for wireless networks with large numbers of nodes and highly dynamic topologies.

    He was a staff scientist at ICIR, the ICSI Center for Internet Research (previously named ACIRI) at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley between the fall of 2000 and fall of 2002. While at ICIR, he worked on topics including scalable distributed storage for sensor networks, reordering-robust window-based congestion control, and traffic engineering for multi-hop wireless networks.

    He then spent three years as a Senior Staff Researcher at Intel Research Pittsburgh, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department. At Intel Research/CMU, he continued his long-standing research thrust on geographic routing (CLDP), and started new projects in distributed system architecture (Open DHT) and Internet worm defense (Autograph and Polygraph).

    Brad joined UCL in October 2005 as a recipient of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award, where he is now a Professor of Computer Systems and Networks.

    Curriculum vitae

    Publications

    Awad, A. and Karp, B., Enclave-Accelerated Replay: Efficient Integrity for Server Applications, in the Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX 2022), Lausanne, Switzerland, 2022. .pdf

    Awad, A. and Karp, B., Execution Integrity without Implicit Trust of System Software, in the Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX 2019), Huntsville, Ontario, Canada, 2019. .pdf

    Gvozdiev, N., Vissicchio, S., Karp, B., and Handley, M., On Low-Latency-Capable Topologies, and their Impact on the Design of Intra-Domain Routing, in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Computer Communications (SIGCOMM 2018), Budapest, Hungary, August, 2018. .pdf

    Gvozdiev, N., Vissicchio, S., Karp, B., and Handley, M., Low-Latency Routing on Mesh-Like Backbones, in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2017), Palo Alto, CA, November, 2017. .pdf

    Nikolaidis, G., Handley, M., Jamieson, K., and Karp, B., COPA: Cooperative Power Allocation for Interfering Wireless Networks, in the Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2015), Heidelberg, Germany, December, 2015. .pdf

    Gvozdiev, N., Karp, B., and Handley, M., FUBAR: Flow Utility-Based Routing, in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2014), Los Angeles, CA, October, 2014. .pdf

    Stefan, D., Yang, E., Marchenko, P., Russo, A., Herman, D., Karp, B., and Mazières, D., Protecting Users by Confining JavaScript with COWL, in the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2014), Broomfield, CO, October, 2014. .pdf

    Salameh, L., Zhushi, A., Handley, M., Jamieson, K., and Karp, B., HACK: Hierarchical ACKs for Efficient Wireless Medium Utilization, in the Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 2014), Philadelphia, PA, June, 2014. Winner of Best Paper Award. .pdf

    Yang, E., Stefan, D., Mitchell, J., Mazières, D., Marchenko, P., and Karp, B., Toward Principled Browser Security, in the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XIV), Santa Ana Pueblo, NM, May, 2013. .pdf

    Gvozdiev, N., Karp, B., and Handley, M., LOUP: The Principles and Practice of Intra-Domain Route Dissemination, in the Proceedings of the Tenth USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2013), Lombard, IL, April, 2013. .pdf

    Gvozdiev, N., Karp, B., and Handley, M., LOUP: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Loop?, in the Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2012), Redmond, WA, October, 2012. .pdf

    Marchenko, P. and Karp, B., Structuring Protocol Implementations to Protect Sensitive Data, in the Proceedings of the Nineteenth USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2010), Washington, DC, August, 2010. .pdf

    Bittau, A., Marchenko, P., Handley, M., and Karp, B., Wedge: Splitting Applications into Reduced-Privilege Compartments, in the Proceedings of the Fifth USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2008), San Francisco, CA, April, 2008. .pdf

    Kim, Y.-J., Govindan, R., Karp, B., and Shenker, S., Lazy Cross-Link Removal for Geographic Routing, in the Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2006), November, 2006. .pdf

    Newsome, J., Karp, B., and Song, D., Paragraph: Thwarting Signature Learning by Training Maliciously, in the Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2006), Hamburg, Germany, September, 2006. .pdf

    Garriss, S., Kaminsky, M., Freedman, M., Karp, B., Mazières, D., and Yu, H., Re: Reliable Email, in the Proceedings of the Third USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006), San Jose, CA, May, 2006. .pdf

    Kim, Y.-J., Govindan, R., Karp, B., and Shenker, S., On the Pitfalls of Geographic Face Routing, in the Proceedings of the Third ACM/SIGMOBILE International Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing (DIAL-M-POMC 2005), Köln, Germany, September, 2005. .pdf

    Rhea, S., Godfrey, P.B., Karp, B., Kubiatowicz, J., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S., Stoica, I., and Yu, H., Open DHT: A Public DHT Service and Its Uses, in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Computer Communications (SIGCOMM 2005), Philadelphia, PA, August, 2005. .pdf

    Newsome, J., Karp, B., and Song, D., Polygraph: Automatically Generating Signatures for Polymorphic Worms, in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2005), Oakland, CA, May, 2005. .pdf

    Kim, Y.-J., Govindan, R., Karp, B., and Shenker, S., Geographic Routing Made Practical, in the Proceedings of the Second USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI 2005), Boston, MA, May, 2005. .pdf

    Gummadi, R., Kothari, N., Kim, Y.-J., Govindan, R., Karp, B., Shenker, S., Reduced-State Routing in the Internet, in the Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2004), San Diego, CA, November, 2004. .pdf

    Kim, H.-A. and Karp, B., Autograph: Toward Automated, Distributed Worm Signature Detection, in Proceedings of the 13th Usenix Security Symposium (Security 2004), San Diego, CA, August, 2004. .ps.gz .pdf
    A previous version of this work:
    Intel Research Pittsburgh Technical Report IRP-TR-04-03, February, 2004.

    Karp, B., Ratnasamy, S., Rhea, S., and Shenker, S., Spurring Adoption of DHTs with OpenHash, a Public DHT Service, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2004), Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science Hot Topics Series, February, 2004. .ps.gz .pdf

    Gibbons, P., Karp, B., Nath, S., Ke, Y., and Seshan, S., IrisNet: An Architecture for a Worldwide Sensor Web, in IEEE Pervasive Computing, Special Issue on Sensor and Actuator Networks, IEEE Press, October-December, 2003.

    Zhang, M., Karp, B., Floyd, S., and Peterson, L., RR-TCP: A Reordering-Robust TCP with DSACK, in Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE International Conference on Networking Protocols (ICNP 2003), Atlanta, GA, November, 2003. .ps.gz .pdf
    An extended version of this work is available as: ICSI Technical Report TR-02-006, Berkeley, CA, July 2002. .ps.gz .pdf

    Ratnasamy, S., Karp, B., Shenker, S., Estrin, D., Govindan, R., Yin, L., and Yu, F., Data-Centric Storage in Sensornets with GHT, A Geographic Hash Table, in Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), Special Issue on Wireless Sensor Networks, 8:4, Kluwer Academic Publishers, August, 2003, pp. 427-442. .pdf

    Tolia, N., Kozuch, M., Satyanarayanan, M., Karp, B., Bressoud, T., and Perrig, A., Opportunistic Use of Content-Addressable Storage for Distributed File Systems, in Conference Proceedings of the Usenix 2003 Annual Technical Conference, San Antonio, TX, May, 2003. .ps.gz .pdf

    Shenker, S., Ratnasamy, S., Karp, B., Govindan, R., and Estrin, D., Data-Centric Storage in Sensornets, in Proceedings of the First ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2002), Princeton, NJ, October, 2002. .ps.gz .pdf

    Ratnasamy, S., Karp, B., Yin, L., Yu, F., Estrin, D., Govindan, R., and Shenker, S., GHT: A Geographic Hash Table for Data-Centric Storage, in Proceedings of the First ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA 2002), Atlanta, GA, September, 2002. .ps.gz .pdf

    Karp, B., Challenges in Geographic Routing: Sparse Networks, Obstacles, and Traffic Provisioning, in the DIMACS Workshop on Pervasive Networking, Piscataway, NJ, May, 2001. .pdf

    Karp, B., Geographic Routing for Wireless Networks, Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, October, 2000. .pdf

    Karp, B. and Kung, H.T., GPSR: Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing for Wireless Networks, in Proceedings of the Sixth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2000), Boston, MA, August, 2000, pp. 243-254. .ps.gz .pdf

    Karp, B., Mankin, A., Kung, H.T., Demirtjis, A., and Edwards, B., An Implementation Study of ABR/EPRCA, ATM Forum Contribution 96-587, April, 1996. .ps.gz

    Blackwell, T., Chan, K., Chang, K., Charuhas, T., Karp, B., Kung, H.T., Lin, D., Morris, R., Seltzer, M., Smith, M., Young, C., Bahgat, O., Chaar, M., Chapman, A., Depelteau, G., Grimble, K., Huang, S., Hung, P., Kemp, M., Mahna, I., McLaughlin, J., Ng, M.T., Vincent, J., Watchorn, J., An Experimental Flow-Controlled Multicast ATM Switch, in Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Telecommunications in Massachusetts, October, 1994. .ps.gz

    Blackwell, T., Chan, K., Chang, K., Charuhas, T., Gwertzman, J., Karp, B., Kung, H.T., Li, W.D., Lin, D., Morris, R., Polansky, R., Tang, D., Young, C., Zao, J., Secure Short-Cut Routing for Mobile IP, in Conference Proceedings of the Usenix Summer 1994 Technical Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, June 6-10, 1994, pp. 305-316. .ps.gz

    Karp, B. and Moulin, P., Implementation of Multiresolution Regression Splines on the MasPar: Function and Image Estimation in Parallel, Bell Communications Research Internal Technical Memorandum, February, 1993.

    Karp, B. and Bischof, C., Increasing the Granularity of Parallelism and Reducing Contention in Automatic Differentiation, Argonne National Laboratory Technical Memorandum ANL/MCS-TM-142, November, 1990.

    Projects

  • COWL and ScriptPolice: Protecting Users' Privacy in Web Browsers from Malicious JavaScript and Browser Extensions
  • FUBAR and Polly: Policy-Compliant Path Selection and Delay and Throughput-Optimized Routing for Enterprise Networks
  • HACK: Hierarchical Acknowledgement: Efficient Medium Utilization for TCP Traffic on WiFi
  • LOUP: A Robust, Provably Loop-Free, Distributed Replacement for iBGP Routing
  • Wedge: OS Primitives and Developer Tools for Exploit-Resistant Software
  • Past Projects

  • Open DHT: A Publicly Accessible DHT Service (formerly known as OpenHash)
  • Autograph: Automated, Distributed Internet Worm Signature Detection
  • GPSR: Geographic Routing
  • RR-TCP: Reordering-Robust DSACK TCP
  • Software

  • GPSR simulation code for ns-2 (details on the code)
  • HUMR: the Harvard User-Level Metricom Radio driver for FreeBSD, built on tun, for Metricom Ricochet Starmode
  • IEEE 802.11 Lucent WaveLAN driver for FreeBSD
  • N23 credit driver for Digital OSF/1 UNIX

  • Quality

  • the La Pavoni Europiccola
  • the Bodum french press
  • Stumptown coffee beans
  • The Economist
  • The New York Times
  • straight-shooting thesis advice, from H.T. Kung
  • tasty grooves, shady characters, and the mu-major chord
  • beautifully designed objects, whimsically presented
  • Alfa Parts [form over function]
  • luce [form and function]
  • abhor this vacuum at your peril
  • KAOS theory in wireless networks