Sumanth Rao

PhD student @
Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego

Email: svrao AT ucsd DOT edu
Address: EBU3B 3142, 9500 Gilman Dr. #0404
La Jolla, CA 92093-0404

         

CV   |  Research  |  Awards  |   In the News  |  Talks  |   Hobbies   |   Gallery

About Me

I am a CS PhD student at UC San Diego advised by Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker. My research focuses on improving security and privacy through empirical means, encompassing areas like enterprise security, web security/privacy, and internet measurement. I am a member of the Sysnet and CryptoSec research groups, and the Center for Networked Systems at UCSD. In my spare time, I keep busy with several hobbies. My hometown is Bengaluru, India. If you're looking for my photography gallery page, go here.

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Research

"Unfiltered: Measuring Cloud-based Email Filtering Bypasses"[promo]
Sumanth Rao, Enze Liu, Grant Ho, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage.
To appear in ACM Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024.

"IRRegularities in the Internet Routing Registry"
Ben Du, Katherine Izhikevich, Sumanth Rao, Gautam Akiwate, Cecilia Testart, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc claffy. ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Montréal, Canada, October 2023.

"No Privacy Among Spies: Assessing the Functionality and Insecurity of Consumer Android Spyware Apps" [poster]
Enze Liu, Sumanth Rao, Sam Havron, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Damon McCoy. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2023.

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Education

		Ph.D. in Computer Science. University of California, San Diego. Sep 2023 - Present.
		M.S. in Computer Science. University of California, San Diego. Sep 2021 - Jun 2023. Specialization in Computer Systems
		Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. PES University, Bengaluru. May 2016 - Jul 2020. Specialization in Data Science

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Industry Experience

Google, San Francisco Software Engineering Intern in Virtual Cluster team at Google Cloud, developing ways to improve the user experience when spawning new Borg clusters (Google's Cluster Manager). Jun 2022 - Sep 2022.

Citrix, Bangalore Software Engineer in the Citrix Licensing team - designing a microservice based (Docker) test automation framework in a hybrid cloud model (Azure Cloud and Citrix's Xen Hypervisors). Aug 2020 - Aug 2021.

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Awards / Scholarship

• Travel grant recipient for IMC 2023 in Montréal, Canada.
• Travel grant recipient for PETS 2023 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
• Recipient of the JN Tata Scholarship from The JN Tata Endowment towards my graduate degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego (2021 - 2022).
• Recipient of Prof. C N R Rao Merit Scholarship for all semesters of study at PES University (2016 - 2020).

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Research in the News

• "Cloud Email Filtering Bypass Attack Works 80% of the Time" DarkReading, ACM Technews, TL;DR Sec
• "This is What Happens When Your Phone is Spying on You" UC San Diego News, University of California News. CACM News, Hacker News, Tech Xplore, SCIENMAG, CTV News, German Prevention Congress News, KPBS

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Talks

• [March 2024] FTC's PrivacyCon 2024, Panel 6: Mobile Device Security Presented Alex's paper detailing our work analyzing Spyware apps, followed by a moderated conversation around Android Security.
• [March 2023] Bypassing Third-Party Email Filtering Services - Systems Seminar, UC San Diego.
• [Nov 2022] Having a great GSoC as an Open Source Newbie!. Shared insights based on my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) journey with the Zulip community. Recording available on Google's Open Source YouTube channel.

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Teaching Experience

• Introduction to Computer Security (CSE 127), by Earlence Fernandes - Spring 2023
• Introduction to Computer Security (CSE 127), by Stefan Savage - Fall 2022
• Graduate Operating Systems (CSE 221), by Geoff Voelker - Winter 2023
• Introduction to Computer Security (CSE 127), by George Obaido - Spring 2022

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Services

GradWIC Mentor. UCSD Graduate Women in Computing . 2023.
VP External. Jacobs Student Graduate Council. 2021 - 2023.
Seargent at arms. Citrix Orators Toastmasters Club. 2020 - 2021.

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Open Source

I spent the summer of 2019 as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Student with the Zulip Open Source Project. Here's the project worked on during that period. I later mentored for the 2020 [1, 2] and 2021 summer programs.

All my contributions are open sourced and most of them are available below.

• https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal/commits?author=sumanthvrao
  
• https://github.com/zulip/zulip/commits?author=sumanthvrao

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Hobbies

My two favorite hobbies are hiking and running! Some of my favourite himalayan hikes/treks have been - Hampta Pass, Bharmatal , Valley Of Flowers. I've ventured on some beautiful hikes in San Diego - Strawberry Junction on Mt San Jacinto , Anza Borrego Desert Hike, Fortuna Mtn Trail, Black Mountain Trail on Mt San Jacinto (this one has some funny pics), Cowles Mountain, Torrey Pines - to name a few. I'm also into badminton, tennis and basketball! I occasionally capture photos here and there - checkout some of my clicks or follow @say__cheeesee on instagram!