Andrey Ermolinskiy Photo

About Me


I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2011, where I worked under the guidance of Prof. Scott Shenker. My academic research experience spans several areas in the field of computer systems, focusing specifically on parallel distributed systems, networking, storage systems, virtual machines, hypervisors, and dynamic information flow analysis. My Ph.D. thesis proposes Practical Information Flow Tracking (PIFT) - a novel hypervisor-driven information security platform for enterprise environments. PIFT provides mechanisms for tracking the movement of sensitive information between applications, machines, and users, allowing enterprise security administrators to enforce high-level information flow policies and protect sensitive documents from disclosure to unauthorized parties. PIFT relies on fine-grained (instruction-level) information flow tracking techniques and achieves efficiency through speculative execution and parallelization. Unlike prior research efforts in this area, PIFT requires no changes to applications or the operating system.

In the past, I have worked on developing novel synchronization protocols for distributed storage systems, investigating new protocols for interdomain packet routing, and exploring new architectures for future Internet.

Minuet investigates the problem of concurrency control in shared-disk parallel applications. I conceived and led the development of a novel synchronization primitive that lifts the safety and liveness limitations associated with the traditional approaches based on conservative distributed locking.

I have co-invented Free Riding Multicast (FRM) -- a new routing protocol for interdomain network-level multicast that achieves scalability and reliability, while requiring only several incremental extensions to the existing unicast routing infrastructure. I have led the research into Anomaly-Cognizant Forwarding (ACF) -- an extension to the Border Gateway Protocol that seeks to eliminate transient route fluctuations, "black holes", and other undesirable routing anomalies. I was also one of the original designers of the Data-Oriented Network Architecture (DONA) -- a clean-slate redesign of Internet naming and name resolution.

I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2002.


Publications
Refereed Papers
  • "C2Cfs: A Collective Caching Architecture for Distributed File Access". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Renu Tewari. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Network Storage and Data Management (NSDM'09), held in conjunction with IEEE HPCC-09, Seoul, Korea, June 2009. [pdf]
  • "Minuet: Rethinking Concurrency Control in Storage Area Networks". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Daekyeong Moon, Byung-Gon Chun, Scott Shenker. In Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'09), San Francisco, CA, February 2009. [pdf]
  • "S3: Securing Sensitive Stuff". Sachin Katti, Andrey Ermolinskiy, Martin Casado, Scott Shenker, Hari Balakrishnan. USENIX OSDI 2008 Work in Progress Report, San Diego, CA, December 2008.
  • "Reducing Transient Disconnectivity using Anomaly-Cognizant Forwarding". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Scott Shenker. In Proceedings of ACM HotNets-VII, Calgary, Canada, October 2008. [pdf]
  • "A Data-Oriented (and Beyond), Network Architecture". Teemu Koponen, Mohit Chawla, Byung-Gon Chun, Andrey Ermolinskiy, Kye Hyun Kim, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'07, Kyoto, Japan, August 2007. [pdf]
  • "Revisiting IP Multicast". Sylvia Ratnasamy, Andrey Ermolinskiy, and Scott Shenker. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'06, Pisa, Italy, September 2006. [pdf]
  • "Pitch Histograms in Audio and Symbolic Music Information Retrieval". George Tzanetakis, Andrey Ermolinskiy, and Perry Cook. In Proceedings of ISMIR'02, Paris, France, October 2002. [pdf]
  • "Beyond the Query-by-Example Paradigm: New Query Interfaces for Music Information Retrieval". George Tzanetakis, Andrey Ermolinskiy, and Perry Cook. In Proceedings ICMC'02, Gothenburh, Sweden, September 2002. [pdf]

Technical Reports
  • Ph.D. Thesis: "Design and Implementation of a Hypervisor-Based Platform for Dynamic Information Flow Tracking in a Distributed Environment" Andrey Ermolinskiy. UCB Technical Report (UCB/EECS-2011-50), May 2011.
  • "Towards Practical Taint Tracking" Andrey Ermolinskiy, Sachin Katti, Scott Shenker, Lisa Fowler, Murphy McCauley. UCB Technical Report (UCB/EECS-2010-92), June 2010. [pdf]
  • "Design and Implementation of a Privacy-Preserving Database on PDC". Andrey Ermolinskiy, September 2009.[pdf]
  • "C2Cfs: A Collective Caching Architecture for Distributed File Access". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Renu Tewari. UCB Technical Report (UCB/EECS-2009-40), March 2009.[pdf]
  • "Reducing Transient Disconnectivity using Anomaly-Cognizant Forwarding". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Scott Shenker. UCB Technical Report (UCB/EECS-2008-120), September 2008.[pdf]
  • "Minuet: Rethinking Concurrency Control in Storage Area Networks". Andrey Ermolinskiy, Daekyeong Moon, Byung-Gon Chun, Scott Shenker. UCB Technical Report (UCB/EECS-2008-57), May 2008. [pdf]
  • "The Design and Implementation of Free Riding Multicast". Andrey Ermolinskiy. Master's Report, May 2007. [pdf]

Conference Talks
  • "Minuet: Rethinking Concurrency Control in Storage Area Networks". FAST '09, San Francisco, CA, 2009. [ppt]
  • "Anomaly-Cognizant Forwarding". ACM HotNets'08, Calgary, Canada, 2008. [ppt]
  • "Free Riding Multicast". ACM SIGCOMM'06, Pisa, Italy, 2006. [ppt]
Professional Service
Reviewer for the following conferences:
  • SRDS '08
  • PDCAT '09