Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, Illinois)
August 2016 to June 2020
Dissertation: “Securing the Software-defined Networking Control Plane by Using Control and Data Dependency Techniques”
Research co-advisor: Prof. William H. Sanders
Research co-advisor: Prof. Adam Bates
M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, Illinois)
August 2014 to August 2016
Thesis: “An Attack Model, Language, and Injector for the Control Plane of Software-defined Networks”
Research advisor: Prof. William H. Sanders
B.S. (Honors), Computer Engineering
Clemson University (Clemson, South Carolina)
August 2010 to May 2014
Research advisor: Prof. Kuang-Ching (K.-C.) Wang
Academic advisor: Prof. Harlan B. Russell
Contact for more information.
Graduate Research Intern
Cyber Analytics and Decision Systems (CADS) Group
Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group
MIT Lincoln Laboratory (Lexington, Massachusetts)
May 2017 to August 2017
May 2018 to August 2019
Graduate Research Assistant
Performability Engineering Research (PERFORM) Group
Information Trust Institute (ITI) / Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, Illinois)
June 2015 to July 2020
Carver Fellow
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, Illinois)
College of Engineering
August 2014 to June 2015
Software Engineering Intern
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Project Office
Raytheon BBN Technologies (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
June 2013 to August 2014
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Clemson OpenFlow (OFCLEM) Group
Clemson University (Clemson, South Carolina)
June 2011 to May 2014
“Provenance-Enabled Explainable AI” (ACM link)
Jiachi Zhang, Wenchao Zhou, and Benjamin E. Ujcich
To be presented at 2025 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ‘25)
Acceptance rate: TBD
Berlin, Germany, 22-27 June 2025
“Exploiting Temporal Vulnerabilities for Unauthorized Access in Intent-Based Networking” (ACM link)
Ben Weintraub, Jiwon Kim, Ran Tao, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Hamed Okhravi, Dave (Jing) Tian, and Benjamin E. Ujcich
2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ‘24)
Acceptance rate: TBD
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 14-18 October 2024
“NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge” (IEEE link)
Patrick Tser Jern Kon, Aniket Gattani, Dhiraj Saharia, Tianyu Cao, Diogo Barradas, Ang Chen, Micah Sherr, and Benjamin E. Ujcich
2024 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P/Oakland ‘24)
Acceptance rate: TBD
San Francisco, California, USA, 20-22 May 2024
“Intender: Fuzzing Intent-Based Networking with Intent-State Transition Guidance” (USENIX link)
Jiwon Kim, Benjamin E. Ujcich, and Dave (Jing) Tian
2023 USENIX Security Symposium (Security ‘23)
Acceptance rate: TBD
Anaheim, California, USA, 9-11 August 2023
“Causal Analysis for Software-Defined Networking Attacks” (USENIX link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Samuel Jero, Richard Skowyra, Adam Bates, William H. Sanders, and Hamed Okhravi
2021 USENIX Security Symposium (Security ‘21)
Acceptance rate: 18.2%
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (virtual), 11-13 August 2021
“Provenance for Intent-Based Networking” (IEEE link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Adam Bates, and William H. Sanders
2020 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft ‘20)
Ghent, Belgium (virtual), 29 June - 3 July 2020
“Automated Discovery of Cross-Plane Event-Based Vulnerabilities in Software-Defined Networking”
(slides) (NDSS
link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Samuel Jero, Richard Skowyra, Steven R. Gomez, Adam Bates, William H. Sanders, and Hamed Okhravi
2020 ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS ‘20)
Acceptance rate: 17.4%
San Diego, California, USA, 23-26 February 2020
“Data Protection Intents for Software-Defined Networking”
(slides) (IEEE link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich and William H. Sanders
2019 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft ‘19)
Paris, France, 24-28 June 2019
“Cross-App Poisoning in Software-Defined Networking” (slides) (ACM link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Samuel Jero, Anne Edmundson, Qi Wang, Richard Skowyra, James Landry, Adam Bates, William H. Sanders, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, and Hamed Okhravi
2018 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ‘18)
Acceptance rate: 16.6%
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 15-19 October 2018
“Towards an Accountable Software-Defined Networking Architecture” (slides) (IEEE link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Andrew Miller, Adam Bates, and William H. Sanders
2017 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft ‘17)
Bologna, Italy, 3-7 July 2017
“ATTAIN: An Attack Injection Framework for Software-Defined Networking” (slides) (IEEE link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Uttam Thakore, and William H. Sanders
2017 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN ‘17)
Acceptance rate: 24.5%
Denver, Colorado, USA, 26-29 June 2017
“REMAX: Reachability-Maximizing P2P Detection of Erroneous Readings in Wireless Sensor Networks” (IEEE link)
Varun Badrinath Krishna, Michael J. Rausch, Benjamin E. Ujcich, Indranil Gupta, and William H. Sanders
2017 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN ‘17)
Acceptance rate: 24.5%
Denver, Colorado, USA, 26-29 June 2017
“Thoughts on the Internet Architecture from a Modern Enterprise Network Outage” (IEEE link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Kuang-Ching Wang, Dan Schmiedt, and Brian Parker
2012 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS ‘12)
Maui, Hawaii, USA, 16-20 April 2012
“A Provenance Model for the European Union General Data Protection Regulation” (slides) (Springer link)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Adam Bates, and William H. Sanders
7th International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW ‘18)
London, England, UK, 9-10 July 2018
“Data Provenance for Accountability Mechanisms and Properties” (slides)
Benjamin E. Ujcich, Adam Bates, and William H. Sanders
First Workshop on Supporting Algorithm Accountability using Provenance (SAAP ‘18)
London, England, UK, 12 July 2018
Invited speaker
‘‘No Ill Intent? Understanding the Security Threats and Challenges of Intent-Based Networking’’
Computer Science Laboratory Seminar Series
SRI International, May 2024
Invited speaker
‘‘No Ill Intent? Understanding the Security Threats and Challenges of Intent-Based Networking’’
Computer Science Seminar Series
Virginia Tech (Northern Virginia Center), February 2024
Invited speaker
‘‘No Ill Intent? Understanding the Security Threats and Challenges of Intent-Based Networking’’
Computer Science Speaker Series
University of Massachusetts Amherst, November 2023
Invited speaker
‘‘Securing Software-Defined Networking’’
Computer Science Laboratory Seminar Series
SRI International, February 2022
Invited speaker
‘‘Securing the Software-Defined Networking Control Plane’’
Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2021
Invited speaker
‘‘Securing the Software-Defined Networking Control Plane’’
National Security Agency, November 2020
Guest lecturer
CS 461 / ECE 422 (Introduction to Computer Security)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 2019
Guest lecturer
CS 563 / ECE 524 (Advanced Computer Security)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 2018
Speaker and panel member, “Data Provenance for GDPR Compliance” (slides)
2018 Law and Data Science Summit (LDS ‘18)
Illinois Data Science Initiative, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 2018