Alexander Moshchuk Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington, Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98105-2350 Office: 486 Allen Center

About

I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington in the Computer Science and Engineering department. I'm advised jointly by Steve Gribble and Hank Levy. My research interests lie in web security, operating systems, and their intersection. Most of my work centers around characterizing and defending against the new generation of web-borne threats, as well as better architecting browsers to be more robust against these threats. I will be graduating in summer of 2009 and joining Microsoft Research in the fall.

Research projects

• Gazelle: During my recent internship at MSR, I worked with Helen Wang on building a safer, more robust web browser architecture.
• Botlab: a real-time botnet monitoring system that combines novel data collection techniques to obtain new and interesting measurements about spamming botnets.
• Flashproxy: a system that uses VM-based remote execution to transparently enable active content (such as Flash or Silverlight) on heterogeneous mobile devices that lack support for such content.
• Spyproxy: a system that defends against drive-by download attacks by checking the safety of web pages in a VM-based proxy. Spyproxy shows how to do real-time VM-based safety testing in a way that has reasonable latency.
• Spycrawler: We conducted first large-scale measurement studies of malware on the web by building a distributed web crawler that uses virtual machines to sandbox and analyze potentially malicious content. We also developed a VM-based analysis that uses behavioral techniques to identify web pages with drive-by downloads.
• Dynamo.NET: a custom virtual machine for .NET, including a binary rewriter for security applications. (Undergraduate project at Cornell)

Publications

The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser
Helen J. Wang, Chris Grier, Alexander Moshchuk, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury, Herman Venter.
To appear in the Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, Montreal, Canada, August 2009.

Studying Spamming Botnets Using Botlab [pdf] [bibtex]
John P. John, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Arvind Krishnamurthy.
To appear in the Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '09), Boston, MA, April 2009.

Flashproxy: Transparently Enabling Rich Web Content via Remote Execution [pdf] [bibtex]
Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2008), Breckenridge, Colorado, June 2008. Best paper runner-up.

Organizing and Sharing Distributed Personal Web-Service Data [pdf] [bibtex]
Roxana Geambasu, Cherie Cheung, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2008), Beijing, China, April 2008.

Metadata Management Engine for Data Integration with Reverse-Engineering Support [demo]
Michael Gubanov, Phil Bernstein, and Alexander Moshchuk.
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2008), Cancun, Mexico, April 2008.

SpyProxy: Execution-based Detection of Malicious Web Content [pdf] [bibtex]
Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Damien Deville, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the 16th Annual USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, August 2007.

A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web [pdf] [bibtex]
Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy.
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS 2006), San Diego, CA, February 2006.


Several of my projects have been covered in the press. Here are some of the links:

Gazelle: InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, Slashdot
Botlab: Network World
Spyproxy: InfoWorld, PC World
Spycrawler: Science Daily, LiveScience, Slashdot (2)

Teaching

As a grad student, I've TA'ed CSE 451 (Operating Systems), CSE 371 (Architecture), and CSE 467 (Advanced Digital Design). As part of my internship at Intel Russia, I spent a summer in the city of Nizhny Novgorod and taught an operating systems course (in Russian!) as part of Intel Studio, a new educational program focusing on a strong systems curriculum.

Personal

I was born and grew up in Moscow, Russia. Before coming to Seattle, I spent four wonderful undergraduate years at Cornell University in sunny Ithaca, NY, double-majoring in computer science and electrical engineering. I've also done summer internships at Microsoft Research, Intel, VMware, Microsoft, and GM.

In my free time, you can find me skiing and playing ice hockey, and when it's warmer and sunnier I switch to hiking, tennis, and soccer. I've been playing piano since I was 9 and still practice regularly. I'm also a frequent traveler and enjoy listening to classical music.