Yi-Min Wang, Ph.D. Director, Search Quality & Cyber-Intelligence Lab Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052, USA ymwang <at> microsoft <dot> com Last Modified: March 24, 2008

I was previously Manager of Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group. I’m now a Director in the newly established Internet Services Research Center (ISRC), building and managing the following three groups:

Search Quality & Cyber-Intelligence Lab (SQ-CIL)

(1) Search Quality Group (SQG): understanding where Live Search is ahead of Google, where we are behind and how we can catch up through metrics measurement and data analysis;

(2) Cybersecurity and Systems Management Group (CSM): basic and applied research in the areas of systems, networking, and security;

(3) Advanced Development Group (ADG): scalability, reliability, and extensibility of Search systems/components, and experimental infrastructure

Recent Research Projects & Papers

• Yi-Min on The New York Times: “Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages,” by John Markoff, March 19, 2007
• Shuo Chen, Jose Meseguer, Ralf Sasse, Helen Wang, and Yi-Min Wang “A Systematic Approach to Uncover GUI Logic Flaws for Web Security,” to appear in Proc. IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy (the Oakland Conference), May 2007
• Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, Jacob R. Lorch, “SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines”, in Proc. IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy (the Oakland Conference), May 2006.
• Strider: Cybersecurity & Systems Management
• Publications (see a complete list of Strider publications here)
• Yi-Min Wang, Ming Ma, Yuan Niu, and Hao Chen, “Spam Double-Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers,” to appear in Proc. International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, May 2007
• Y. Niu, Y. M. Wang, H. Chen, M. Ma, and F. Hsu, “A Quantitative Study of Forum Spamming Using Context-based Analysis,” in Proc. Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, Feb. 2007.
• Chad Verbowski, Emre Kıcıman, Brad Daniels, Arunvijary Kumar, Yi-Min Wang, Roussi Roussev, Shan Lu, Juhan Lee, “Flight Data Recorder: Always-on Tracing and Scalable Analysis of Persistent State Interactions to Improve Systems and Security Management,” in Proc. Seventh Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2006
• Yi-Min Wang, Doug Beck, Xuxian Jiang, Roussi Roussev, Chad Verbowski, Shuo Chen, and Sam King, “Automated Web Patrol with Strider HoneyMonkeys: Finding Web Sites That Exploit Browser Vulnerabilities,” in Proc. Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, February 2006.
• Yi-Min Wang, Doug Beck, Binh Vo, Roussi Roussev, and Chad Verbowski, “Detecting Stealth Software with Strider GhostBuster,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), June 2005.
• Helen J. Wang, John Platt, Yu Chen, Ruyun Zhang, and Yi-Min Wang, “Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting with PeerPressure,” in Proc. Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Dec. 2004
• Yi-Min Wang, Roussi Roussev, Chad Verbowski, Aaron Johnson, Ming-Wei Wu, Yennun Huang, and Sy-Yen Kuo, “Gatekeeper: Monitoring Auto-Start Extensibility Points (ASEPs) for Spyware Management,” in Proc. Usenix LISA, Nov. 2004
• Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, John Dunagan, Yu Chen, Helen J. Wang, Chun Yuan, and Zheng Zhang, “STRIDER: A Black-box, State-based Approach to Change and Configuration Management and Support,” in Proc. Usenix LISA (Best Paper), pp. 159-172, Oct. 2003.
• Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, and Daniel R. Simon, “Persistent-state Checkpoint Comparison for Troubleshooting Configuration Failures,” in Proc. IEEE DSN, June 2003.
• Presentations
• “STRIDER: A Computer Genomics Approach to Systems Management and Support,”
1. Invited Talk, Stanford University, May 6, 2003.
• “STRIDER: A New Approach to Configuration and Security Management”
1. Invited Talk, UC Berkeley, Oct. 28, 2004
2. Invited Talk, Georgia Tech, Nov. 18, 2004

Recent Professional Activities

• Program Committee Member
1. Usenix Security Symposium, 2007
2. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2008
3. International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2007
4. ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Large-Scale Attack Defense (LSAD), 2007

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Previous Research Projects and Papers

• Masquerade: "You can encrypt, but you can't hide." Traffic patterns tell a lot about the Web sites that you're browsing.
• Conducted a 100,000-site experiment to show that traffic information consisting of the number of Web objects and object sizes suffices to identify many Web sites.
• Publications
• Qixiang Sun, Daniel R. Simon, Yi-Min Wang, Wilf Russell, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, and Lili Qiu, " Statistical Identification of Encrypted Web Browsing Traffic ," in Proc. IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (the Oakland conference), May 2002.

• Panorama: Distributed topology control for wireless multi-hop ad hoc networks, based on directional information
• Proved that "150 degrees" can be special - it's a tight upper bound for guaranteeing global network connectivity!
• Publications
• L. Li, J. Y. Halpern, P. Bahl, Y. M. Wang, and R. Wattenhofer, " Analysis of a Cone-based Distributed Topology Control Algorithm for Wireless Multi-hop Networks," in Proc. ACM PODC, August 2001. (Conference presentation slides)
• R. Wattenhofer, L. Li, P. Bahl, and Y. M. Wang, "Distributed Topology Control for Power Efficient Operation in Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, April 2001.

• Aladdin: Dependable home networks as an extension of the Web
• You can send secure emails to close your garage door; you get an Instant Message when an earthquake causes a power outage at home.
• Articles
• Seattle PI news article: "It was a fishy way for a scientist to start wiring houses onto Web"
• MSR article: "There's no place like home"
• Publications
• Y. M. Wang, W. Russell, and A. Arora, " A Toolkit for Building Dependable and Extensible Home Networking Applications," in Proc. 4th USENIX Windows Systems Symposium, August 2000.
• Y. M. Wang, et al., "Towards Dependable Home Networking: An Experience Report," in Proc. IEEE DSN/FTCS, June 2000.
• Y. M. Wang, P. Bahl, and Wilf Russell, "The SIMBA User Alert Service Architecture for Dependable Alert Delivery," to appear in Proc. IEEE DSN, July 2001.
• A. Arora, R. Jagannathan and Y. M. Wang, "Model-based Design of Dependability in Distributed Systems", in Workshop on Concurrency in Dependable Computing, Newcastle, England 2001.
• A. Arora, R. Jagannathan and Y. M. Wang, "Model-based Fault Detection in Powerline Networking", in Proc. International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2002.
• High-level system architecture
• Conference presentation slides
• MobiSys 2003 Panel Presentation Slide Deck
• IEEE ISORC 2005 Panel Presentation Slide Deck

• Millennium Falcon: Fast DCOM over SAN (System Area Network)
• Optimizations at all layers: marshaling, runtime, and transport
• Performance numbers
• 72-microsecond DCOM round-trip latency
• 86.1 megabytes/second DCOM application bandwidth
• 174-microsecond MTS round-trip latency
• Publication
• A. Forin, G. Hunt, L. Li, and Y. M. Wang, " High-Performance Distributed Objects over System Area Networks," in Proc. 3rd USENIX Windows NT Symp., pp. 21-30, July 1999.

Previous Professional Activities

• Program Chair
1. Program Co-Chair, International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), 2005
2. Program Vice-Chair, Fault Tolerant and Dependable Computing Track, International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2005
3. Program Co-Chair, The 6th Usenix Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS), 2001
• Program Committee Member
1. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2006
2. International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2006
3. Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), 2005
4. Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA), 2005
5. International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), 2004
6. ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2002

Conference committee activities

Publications

Talks

Honors and Awards

Vita

Other Links

· Overparenting (or direct link: Overparenting or an alternative doorway: Overparenting)

· Mathematical Food for Thought (or direct link: Mathematical Food for Thought)

· Gaming and Art

· Advanced Troubleshooting for Windows

Other Recent Papers

· E. N. Elnozahy, L. Alvisi, Y. M. Wang , and D. B. Johnson, A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-passing Systems,” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 34, Issue 3, pp. 375 – 408, Sept. 2002.

• P. E. Chung, Y. Huang, S. Yajnik, D. Liang, J. C. Shih, C.-Y. Wang, and Y. M. Wang, " DCOM and CORBA Side by Side, Step By Step, and Layer by Layer," in C++ Report, Jan. 1998.
• Y. M. Wang and Woei-Jyh Lee, " COMERA: COM Extensible Remoting Architecture," in Proc. COOTS, April 1998.
• J. Tsai, S.-Y. Kuo, and Y. M. Wang, " Theoretical Analysis for Communication-Induced Checkpointing Protocols with Rollback-Dependency Trackability, IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Oct. 1998.
• Y. M. Wang and P.-Y. E. Chung, " Exploring Customization of Distributed Systems using COM," IEEE Concurrency Magazine, July-Sep. 1998.

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