Barath Raghavan

barath.raghavan@usc.edu

About

I joined the computer science faculty at USC in 2018 after a number of years in industry and academia. I received my PhD from UC San Diego in 2009 and my BS from UC Berkeley in 2002. I co-lead the networked systems lab and recently spun out INVISV.

I have very broad interests and my projects frequently span multiple areas of CS and other disciplines. Currently I have active projects in security/privacy, networked systems, agriculture, and fire mitigation.

Contact

University of Southern California
Department of Computer Science
941 Bloom Walk, SAL 214, MC 0781
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781

Teaching

Crafting a Research Agenda, CSCI 654, Fall 2023
Computing for Sustainability and Social Good, CSCI 499, Spring 2022
Crafting a Research Agenda, CSCI 699, Spring 2022
Computing for Social Good, CSCI 499, Spring 2021
Robust Systems Design and Implementation, CSCI 499, Spring 2021
Crafting a Research Agenda, CSCI 699, Spring 2021
Computing and Global Change, CSCI 490, Fall 2020
Robust Software Design and Implementation, CSCI 499, Spring 2020
Robust Software Design and Implementation, CSCI 499, Spring 2019
Computing for Social Good, CSCI 499, Spring 2019
Computing for Social Good, CS 194, Fall 2017 (UC Berkeley)
Practical Networking (with Shenker and Weaver), CS 194, Spring 2016 (UC Berkeley)
Algorithm Design and Analysis, CS 256, Spring 2010 (Williams College)
Data Structures and Advanced Programming, CS 136, Spring 2010 (Williams College)
Theory of Computation, CS 361, Fall 2009 (Williams College)
Data Structures and Advanced Programming, CS 61B, Summer 2002 (UC Berkeley)

Recent Essays

The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
Lawfare, July 2024

How Online Privacy is Like Fish
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
IEEE Spectrum, June 2024

Seeing Like a Data Structure
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, May 2024

CFPB's proposed data rules would improve security, privacy and competition
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
Cyberscoop, January 2024

The Decoupling Principle and the Future of Security and Privacy
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
IEEE Spectrum, December 2023

Computer science can help farmers explore alternative crops and sustainable farming methods
Barath Raghavan and Michael Kantar
The Conversation [also Fast Company, Yahoo News, etc.], August 2023

The AI Dividend [and FAQ/policy notes]
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
Politico, June 2023

Brace Yourself for a Tidal Wave of ChatGPT Email Scams
Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan
Wired, January 2023

Banning TikTok
Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan
Foreign Policy, February 2023

Bitcoin's Greatest Feature Is Also Its Existential Threat
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier
Wired, March 2021

Papers

FireLoc: Low-latency Multi-modal Wildfire Geolocation
Xiao Fu, Yue Hu, Prashanth Sutrave, Peter A. Beerel, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SenSys, November 2024
Rapid localization of wildfires in the WUI through low-cost crowdsourcing.

eBPFlow: A Hardware/Software Platform to Seamlessly Offload Network Functions Leveraging eBPF
Racyus D. G. Pacífico, Lucas F. S. Duarte, Luiz F. M. Vieira, Barath Raghavan, José A. M. Nacif, and Marcos A. M. Vieira
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, April 2024
Offloading eBPF network functions to FPGAs.

Edible fire buffers: mitigation of wildfire with multifunctional landscapes
Xiao Fu, Abigail Lidar, Michael Kantar, and Barath Raghavan
PNAS Nexus, October 2023
On the benefit of productive and protective firebreaks.
News: LAist, KPCC / NPR Southern California, Atlas Obscura, ...

SoK: The Ghost Trilemma
Sulagna Mukherjee, Srivatsan Ravi, Paul Schmitt, and Barath Raghavan
arXiv:2308.02202, August 2023
The hardness of proving identity in decentralized systems.

Scheduling Network Function Chains Under Sub-Millisecond Latency SLOs
Jianfeng Wang, Siddhant Gupta, Marcos Vieira, Barath Raghavan, and Ramesh Govindan
arXiv:2305.01890, May 2023
Honing NFV performance.

State Spaces for Agriculture: A Meta-systematic Design Automation Framework
Bryan Runck, Adam Streed, Diane Wang, Patrick Ewing, Michael Kantar, and Barath Raghavan
PNAS Nexus, March 2023
A framework to explore radically-new ways of doing agriculture.

The Decoupling Principle: A Practical Privacy Framework
Paul Schmitt, Jana Iyengar, Christopher Wood, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), November 2022
Simple guidelines for the design of privacy systems.

Quadrant: A Cloud-Deployable NF Virtualization Platform
Jianfeng Wang, Tamás Lévai, Zhuojin Li, Marcos Vieira, Ramesh Govindan, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SoCC, November 2022
Making NFV fast and flexible.

Opening the Gate to Urban Repair: A Tool for Citizen-Led Design
Sarah Cooney and Barath Raghavan
PACM HCI / ACM CSCW, April 2022
Rethinking sustainable, resident-driven urban design from the bottom up.

Information Batteries: Storing Opportunity Power with Speculative Execution
Jennifer Switzer and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGENERGY EIR, November 2021
Storing surplus renewable energy by pre-computing future tasks.
News: Wired, Grist, TechRadar, PV Magazine, ...

Robotic Lime Picking by Considering Leaves as Permeable Obstacles
Heramb Sandeep Nemlekar, Ziang Liu, Suraj Kothawade, Sherdil Niyaz, Barath Raghavan, and Stefanos Nikolaidis
IEEE/RSJ IROS, October 2021
How to adapt to different types of obstacles in fruit picking.

Semi-Automated Protocol Disambiguation and Code Generation
Jane Yen, Tamás Lévai, Qinyuan Ye, Xiang Ren, Ramesh Govindan, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2021
RFC Disambiguated RFC Code.

Pretty Good Phone Privacy
Paul Schmitt and Barath Raghavan
USENIX Security, August 2021
How to build location-privacy preserving cell service.
News: Wired, The Register, Ars Technica, ACM TechNews, ...

A Pluralist Approach to Democratizing Online Discourse
Jay Chen, Barath Raghavan, Paul Schmitt, and Tai Liu
arXiv:2108.12573, August 2021
Rethinking online content moderation.

Tools for Disambiguating RFCs
Jane Yen, Ramesh Govindan, and Barath Raghavan
ACM/IRTF ANRW, July 2021
Introducing RFC disambiguation.

How Sustainable is the Smart Farm?
Adam Streed, Michael Kantar, Bill Tomlinson, and Barath Raghavan
LIMITS, June 2021
Digging into the real (un)sustainability of vertical and smart farming.

TerraWatt: Sustaining Sustainable Computing of Containers in Containers
Jennifer Switzer, Rob McGuinness, Pat Pannuto, George Porter, Aaron Schulman, and Barath Raghavan
arXiv:2102.06614, February 2021
Compute using surplus renewable energy and old hardware.

Migration in the Stencil Pluralist Cloud Architecture
Tai Liu, Zain Tariq, Barath Raghavan, and Jay Chen
arXiv:2102.03964, February 2021
Enabling data migration between cloud applications.

Galleon: Reshaping the Square Peg of NFV
Jianfeng Wang, Tamás Lévai, Zhuojin Li, Marcos Vieira, Ramesh Govindan, and Barath Raghavan
arXiv:2101.06466, January 2021
Fast NFV with seamless isolation and FaaS-based scaling.

Meeting SLOs in Cross-Platform NFV
Jane Yen, Jianfeng Wang, Sucha Supittayapornpong, Marcos Vieira, Ramesh Govindan, and Barath Raghavan
ACM CoNEXT, December 2020
How to integrate P4 and OpenFlow switches, smart NICs, and software and hit NFV SLOs.

Beyond the Trees: Resilient Multipath for Last-mile WISP Networks
Bilal Saleem, Paul Schmitt, Jay Chen, and Barath Raghavan
arXiv:2002.12473, February 2020
How to build faster and more reliable WISP networks for less.

Batchy: Batch-scheduling Data Flow Graphs with Service-level Objectives
Tamás Lévai, Felicián Németh, Barath Raghavan, and Gábor Rétvári
USENIX NSDI, February 2020
Analysis and improvement of batching in data-flow graph contexts, such as NFV.

Towards Highly Available Clos-Based WAN Routers
Sucha Supittayapornpong, Barath Raghavan, and Ramesh Govindan
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2019
Techniques for efficient and resilient Clos topology and routing design.

Enabling a Permanent Revolution in Internet Architecture
James McCauley, Yotam Harchol, Aurojit Panda, Barath Raghavan, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2019
A framework for seamless, incremental deployment of new Internet architectures.

The many‐faced Janus of plant breeding
Michael Kantar, Bryan Runck, Barath Raghavan, Alison Joglekar, Senait Senay, Brian Krohn, Jeffrey Neyhart, James Bradeen, Marybel Soto Gomez, and Roger Kjelgren
Plants, People, Planet, March 2019
An argument for broader efforts in sustainable plant breeding.

Computing Within Limits
Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson, Donald J. Patterson, Jay Chen, Daniel Pargman, Barath Raghavan, and Birgit Penzenstadler
CACM, October 2018
Overview of LIMITS.

Evaluating Software Switches: Hard or Hopeless?
Vivian Fang, Tamás Lévai, Sangjin Han, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Barath Raghavan, and Justine Sherry
UC Berkeley Technical Report, October 2018
A survey of challenges in vSwitch evaluation and analysis.

Zyxt: A Network Planning Tool for Rural Wireless ISPs
Thomas Pötsch, Salman Yousaf, Barath Raghavan, and Jay Chen
ACM COMPASS, June 2018
Design and implementation of a rural WISP planning tool.

The Barriers to Overthrowing Internet Feudalism
Tai Liu, Zain Tariq, Jay Chen, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XVI), November 2017
Analysis of the challenges in building a democratized Internet.

Means and Ends in Human-Computer Interaction: Sustainability through Disintermediation (best paper honorable mention)
Barath Raghavan and Daniel Pargman
ACM CHI, May 2017
Unifying techniques for building systems that meet key sustainability objectives.

Rangzen: Anonymously Getting the Word Out in a Blackout
Adam Lerner, Giulia Fanti, Yahel Ben-David, Jesus Garcia, Paul Schmitt, and Barath Raghavan
arXiv:1612.03371, December 2016
A mobile system for anonymously evading large-scale network-level censorship.

Helping the Lone Operator in the Vast Frontier
Thomas Potsch, Paul Schmitt, Jay Chen, and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XV), November 2016
Challenges in rural network planning and new approaches to address them.

Recursive SDN for Carrier Networks
James McCauley, Zhi Liu, Aurojit Panda, Teemu Koponen, Barath Raghavan, Jennifer Rexford, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM CCR, October 2016
Techniques to scale SDN for large-scale carrier networks.

The Deforestation of L2
James McCauley, Mingjie Zhao, Ethan Jackson, Barath Raghavan, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2016
A protocol for L2 networks that doesn't build trees and handles failures without drops.

Refactoring Society: Systems Complexity in an Age of Limits
Barath Raghavan and Daniel Pargman
LIMITS, June 2016
Techniques to improve societal sustainability by decreasing sociotechnical complexity.

Macroscopically Sustainable Networking: On Internet Quines
Barath Raghavan and Shaddi Hasan
LIMITS, June 2016
Analysis and discussion of the physical resources that undergird the Internet.

Computational Agroecology: Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design
Barath Raghavan, Bonnie Nardi, Sarah T. Lovell, Juliet Norton, Bill Tomlinson, and Donald J. Patterson
ACM CHI alt.chi, May 2016
Introduction of a new area of computing for a truly sustainable agriculture.

The Challenges of Scaling WISPs (best paper)
Shaddi Hasan, Yahel Ben-David, Max Bittman, and Barath Raghavan
ACM DEV, November 2015
A study of the challenges and our experiences in scaling rural Internet access networks.

Taking an AXE to L2 Spanning Trees
Murphy McCauley, Alice Sheng, Ethan Jackson, Barath Raghavan, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XIV), November 2015
A preliminary protocol to enable tree-less, simple, and efficient L2 routing.

Abstraction, Indirection, and Sevareid's Law: Towards Benign Computing
Barath Raghavan
LIMITS, June 2015
Arguments for making computing systems more structurally diverse and sustainable.

Route Bazaar: Automatic Interdomain Contract Negotiation
Ignacio Castro, Aurojit Panda, Barath Raghavan, Scott Shenker, and Sergey Gorinsky
USENIX/ACM HotOS, May 2015
A technique to enable distributed trust among networks to unlock new routing options.

Self-Obviating Systems and their Application to Sustainability
Bill Tomlinson, Juliet Norton, Eric Baumer, Marcel Pufal, and Barath Raghavan
iConference, March 2015
An argument for research to build systems that make themselves unnecessary over time.

Rethinking Sustainability in Computing: From Buzzword to Non-negotiable Limits
Daniel Pargman and Barath Raghavan
ACM NordiCHI, October 2014
Re-examination of the core tenets of sustainable computing research.

Troubleshooting SDN Control Software with Minimal Causal Sequences
Colin Scott, Andreas Wundsam, Barath Raghavan, Zhi Liu, Sam Whitlock, Ahmed El-Hassany, Andrew Or, Jefferson Lai, Eugene Huang, Hrishikesh B. Acharya, Kyriakos Zarifis, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2014
A system to rapidly identify the inputs that trigger bugs in SDN controllers.

Drilling Network Stacks with packetdrill
Neal Cardwell and Barath Raghavan
USENIX login, October 2013
Discussion of the packetdrill network stack testing system.

Reducing Web Latency: the Virtue of Gentle Aggression (IRTF award paper)
Tobias Flach, Nandita Dukkipati, Andreas Terzis, Barath Raghavan, Neal Cardwell, Yuchung Cheng, Ankur Jain, Shuai Hao, Ethan Katz-Bassett, and Ramesh Govindan
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2013
A family of TCP improvements that send extra packets to decrease Web flow latency.

TCP Instant Recovery: Incorporating Forward Error Correction in TCP
Tobias Flach, Nandita Dukkipati, Yuchung Cheng, and Barath Raghavan
IETF Draft, July 2013
Specification of a protocol that incorporates FEC seamlessly into TCP.

packetdrill: Scriptable Network Stack Testing, from Sockets to Packets
Neal Cardwell, Yuchung Cheng, Lawrence Brakmo, Matt Mathis, Barath Raghavan, Nandita Dukkipati, Jerry Chu, Andreas Terzis, and Tom Herbert
USENIX ATC, June 2013
A system for systematically unit testing real network stacks.

The Role of End-to-End Congestion Control in Networks with Fairness-Enforcing Routers
John McCullough, Barath Raghavan, and Alex Snoeren
UCSD Tech Report, April 2013
Analysis of firehose congestion control with in-network fairness.

Software-Defined Internet Architecture
Barath Raghavan, Teemu Koponen, Martin Casado, Ali Ghodsi, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XI), October 2012
An SDN-based approach to adopt new interdomain service models in the Internet.

Making the Internet More Evolvable
Barath Raghavan, Teemu Koponen, Ali Ghodsi, Vjeko Brajkovic, and Scott Shenker
ICSI Technical Report, September 2012
A system to enable the adoption and evolution of network architectures in the Internet.

An Intermittent Energy Internet Architecture
Barath Raghavan, David Irwin, Jeannie Albrecht, Justin Ma, and Adam Streed
ACM/IEEE E-Energy, May 2012
Techniques for building an Internet that runs on (intermittent) renewable energy sources.

TCP Fast Open (Google award paper)
Siva Radhakrishnan, Yuchung Cheng, Jerry Chu, Arvind Jain, and Barath Raghavan
ACM CoNEXT, December 2011
A TCP modification that safely eliminates the 3-way handshake.

The Energy and Emergy of the Internet
Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-X), November 2011
Estimation of the true energy use of the Internet.

Information-Centric Networking: Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Ali Ghodsi, Teemu Koponen, Barath Raghavan, Scott Shenker, Ankit Singla, James Wilcox
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-X), November 2011
A critical re-examination of the field of Information-Centric Networking

Intelligent Design Enables Architectural Evolution
Ali Ghodsi, Teemu Koponen, Barath Raghavan, Scott Shenker, Ankit Singla, James Wilcox
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-X), November 2011
Discussion of how to evolve the Internet's architecture.

Networking in the Long Emergency (best paper)
Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Green Networking, August 2011
Study of fundamental global challenges that lay ahead and their networking impact.

On Preserving Privacy in Content-Oriented Networks
Somaya Arianfar, Teemu Koponen, Barath Raghavan, and Scott Shenker
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Information-Centric Networking, August 2011
Study of the privacy problems of content-oriented network architectures.

Architecting for Innovation
Teemu Koponen, Scott Shenker, Hari Balakrishnan, Nick Feamster, Igor Ganichev, Ali Ghodsi, Brighten Godfrey, Nick McKeown, Guru Parulkar, Barath Raghavan, Jennifer Rexford, Somaya Arianfar, Dmitriy Kuptsov
ACM SIGCOMM CCR (editorial), July 2011
A meta-architecture that enables architectural evolution for the Internet.

Finding a 'Kneedle' in a Haystack: Detecting Knee Points in System Behavior
Ville Satopaa, Jeannie Albrecht, David Irwin, and Barath Raghavan
IEEE ICDCS SIMPLEX Workshop, June 2011
A simple, general technique to find the key knee points for system parameters.

Hedera: Dynamic Flow Scheduling for Data Center Networks
Mohammad Al-Fares, Siva Radhakrishnan, Barath Raghavan, Nelson Huang, and Amin Vahdat
USENIX/ACM NSDI, April 2010
A system for efficiently allocating large flows to data center network paths.

Enlisting ISPs to Improve Online Privacy: IP Address Mixing by Default
Barath Raghavan, Tadayoshi Kohno, Alex C. Snoeren, and David Wetherall
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), August 2009
A cryptographic mechanism to efficiently implement anonymization on path at ISPs.

Secure and Policy-Compliant Source Routing
Barath Raghavan, Patrick Verkaik, and Alex Snoeren
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, August 2009
A system for cryptographically-secure Internet source routing.

Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting (best student paper)
Barath Raghavan, Kashi Vishwanath, Sriram Ramabhadran, Kenneth Yocum, and Alex Snoeren
ACM SIGCOMM, August 2007
Algorithms to make widely-distributed network links behave like a single limited pipe.

Analysis of the SPV Secure Routing Protocol: Weaknesses and Lessons
Barath Raghavan, Saurabh Panjwani, and Anton Mityagin
ACM SIGCOMM CCR, April 2007
Security attacks on the SPV routing protocol published at SIGCOMM '04.

Decongestion Control
Barath Raghavan and Alex Snoeren
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-V), November 2006
A protocol that turns congestion control on its head using FEC and FQ.

Random State Transitions of Knots: A First Step Towards Modeling Unknotting by Type II Topoisomerases
Xia Hua, Diana Nguyen, Barath Raghavan, Javier Arsuaga, and Mariel Vazquez
Topology and its Applications, November 2006
A knot-theoretic study of how Type II Topoisomerase enzymes enable DNA unknotting.

Append-only Signatures
Eike Kiltz, Anton Mityagin, Saurabh Panjwani and Barath Raghavan
ICALP (Security and Cryptography Foundations track), July 2005
A new type of cryptographic signature scheme that enables secure append operations.

A System for Authenticated Policy-Compliant Routing
Barath Raghavan and Alex Snoeren
ACM SIGCOMM, September 2004
A protocol for cryptographically-secure Internet source routing.

Decoupling Policy from Mechanism in Internet Routing
Alex Snoeren and Barath Raghavan
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-II), November 2003
Introduction of a protocol for secure Internet source routing.

Priority Forwarding in Ad Hoc Networks with Self-Interested Parties
Barath Raghavan and Alex Snoeren
Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems (P2PEcon), June 2003
A proposal to separate robust basic from priced priority forwarding in peer-to-peer networks.